


The Theoretical SIG Sauer

by anonlytree



Category: Football RPF
Genre: AU, Can't even explain what type of AU, Complete crack, Crack, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-21
Updated: 2013-06-22
Packaged: 2017-12-09 02:28:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 23,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/768915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anonlytree/pseuds/anonlytree
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Xabi is an Arsenal fan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Intro

Xabi stares at the condensation droplets splashed onto the oval window of the private jet, sees them swirling around on air currents sliced in invisible halves by the Cesna’s elegant metallic wing. He knows he’s extremely unlikely to find any clouds or rain drops once the plane finally makes contact with the Earth again, but if someone were to ask him on the spot which corner of the planet he’s being pulled towards by gravity, he’d have a hard time remembering the exact answer. When the slick flat screen of the in-flight monitor blinks at him with a reminder of the temperature and inevitably clear-sky-and-sunshine ground conditions in Cartagena, Xabi blinks back at it almost spitefully.  
  
The memory of eight year-old Xabi crouched in the big leather armchair in his father’s study flies in unbidden. He sees himself poring over the ancient globe by the book case, mentally calculating distances between the meridians traced by his still pudgy index finger. Oman… to Sri Lanka… to Macao… to Papua New Guinea. The names glow on the ivory-surface of the globe, set alight by his overactive imagination. He’s read about Papua New Guinea’s fantastic creatures and wild volcanoes in his mother’s National Geographic collection…  
  
Xabi blinks away this version of himself, collects his laptop off the white-leather bound empty seat next to him and straps himself in tighter in preparation for the landing. He’s been to Papua New Guinea twice in the meantime, landed there just last year in fact, but his only memories of the country are the pungent and familiar smells of the oil refinery and the chaos on the streets of Port Moresby.  
  
The Colombian sun blinds him as soon as he steps onto the airstairs; not even his Ray Bans seem to be enough of a safeguard for the few seconds it takes Xabi’s retinas to adapt. A pot-bellied man in uniform greets him at the bottom of the stairs with just the right amount of fake affability and he’s ushered through the VIP terminal of Rafael Núñez International Airport with the minimum amount of fuss. Xabi’s been through the motions so many times that he pays no mind to the liveried chauffer waiting for him with a **Conglomerado Chamartín - Eng. X. Alonso** sign held in front of his standard black suit; he mumbles something indistinct in response to his polite greeting. It’s only later, in the air conditioned silence of the black limousine that Xabi notices the man’s strong accent as he’s caught unable to keep his eyes off the window and on the latest number of The Economist for more than ten seconds at a time.  
  
“First time in Colombia, Sir?”  
  
 _Oh great, here comes the special offer for the local brothel, twenty percent off for “friends of the owner”_ , Xabi thinks, the polite but firm refusal automated by years of practice.  
  
“Actually… no. I have never been to Cartagena though.”  
  
“It’s getting quite popular with oil men such as yourself,” the driver says.  
  
Xabi is still waiting for some sort of sordid soliciting, but for whatever reason he just feels like satisfying this sudden burst of curiosity regardless.  
  
“You’re also quite far away from home… Liverpool, right?”  
  
“What gave me away?” the man chuckles. “I suppose you’ve been around quite a bit, seen the old place yourself.”  
  
“Haven’t got around to it yet, actually. It’s kind of silly, considering I live in London,” Xabi says, a bit surprised to hear himself making conversation instead of recapping the latest talking points before his next briefing and turning the limo into his office away from the office like he normally does.   
  
“Not a lot of oil in Liverpool. Let me guess… You’re an Arsenal man.”  
  
Xabi laughs a little self-consciously and this is definitely a first.  
  
“You don’t pick your team, it picks you. I used to live on Holloway Road when I came to London to study. Am I that obvious?”  
  
“Seems to be the fashionable choice for expats, that’s all. Not a fan meself, but I suppose at least it’s not Chelsea…”  
  
Xabi makes a disdainful face of _Like I’d EVER…_ and knows just what to ask in retaliation, taking his 50-50 chance at payback:  
  
“Everton?”  
  
“Red or dead, mate,” the driver snorts indignantly. “Erm… Sir.”  
  
Xabi likes the sound of his voice.  
  
“The time difference here doesn’t make it easy to keep up with the team though. You’re in luck, you know, Chamartín’ll treat you like a king. They have some of the best facilities for employees I’ve ever seen. Not a lot in the way of entertainment, but that’s what Cartagena’s for if you don’t mind the drive.”  
  
“That’s allright, I’m not exactly a life of the party kind of guy.”  
  
The car comes to a gradual, smooth stop in the middle of the empty road and there’s barely any time for Xabi to notice it or register the full spectrum of what happens next. He sees a gun pointed at him at close range from the front seat and hears his driver’s pleasant voice whisper:  
  
“That’s too bad.”  
  
There’s a piercing sting in his shoulder next and that’s the second to last thing Xabi feels before he collapses on the backseat. The very last thing he feels is stupid for not wondering a bit earlier why the man with the iceberg-blue eyes was wearing black leather gloves in the stifling heat.


	2. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Boom, boom, boom, boom! Gonna shoot you right down...

  
“He’s awake.”  
  
There’s a crackling sound echoing somewhere close to Xabi’s ear and although he’s had his eyes open for a few seconds the world around him is only now starting to come into focus. It’s a fairly limited view. He lifts his chin from his chest and, judging by the strain in the back of his neck, he figures he must have spent at least a few hours sleeping in the metallic chair he’s tied to. The ache in his arms and the burn around his wrists bundled behind his back confirm it. None of those sensations are anywhere near as annoying as the dryness in his mouth; if it literally tastes like cotton, it’s because there’s a piece of khaki cloth gagging it.  
  
There are two men in the room with him (he’s being generous by thinking of it in terms of a “room”; it’s actually a concrete bunker), both wearing green camo pants and black t-shirts, complimented by the obligatory army boots and various lethal weapons hanging from their tattooed arms. The one whose body art extends all the way to his knuckles moves around the wooden table in front of Xabi and lifts the walkie talkie to his mouth again.  
  
“Now?... A-fucking-ffirmative.”  
  
His mohawk and his freckles don’t exactly match the paramilitary look; it’s like he doesn’t belong in the picture, unlike his bald, murderous-looking compadre who guards what Xabi assumes must be the door. The neon light glaring from somewhere above the table doesn’t extend that far. Baldie confirms his suspicions when he punches a code into the wall and the concrete splits with a dry whoosh, making room for a familiar face.  
  
“Apologies,” the obviously not limo driver says, “had to slip into something more comfortable.”  
  
Xabi thinks it’s bizarre he was expecting the Scouse accent to have been some sort of absurd red herring and now he’s surprised the man’s not speaking in some thick Cockney brogue instead. It matched the suit better than the identical paramilitary gear he’s sporting now.  
  
The man spins an empty chair across from Xabi and reverse straddles it, making room for his long legs. Mohawk Man comes up behind Xabi’s chair and frees him of the gag chaffing the corners of his mouth.  
  
“Where am I?”  
  
The scratch in Xabi’s voice betrays the dryness of his mouth.  
  
“That’s not really… relevant right now. You’re our guest and we’d like to treat you well. Let’s start with making sure you don’t try anything stupid first. I trust you’re a reasonable man, even though you’re a Gooner, and if I tell Martin here to untie you, you’re not going to try to die a hero.”  
  
Xabi is determined to be as stoic as humanly possible for a man who’s thirsty, sore and still a bit dizzy from whatever tranquilizer he’d been shot with in the car. There’s no blood around the minuscule hole in his white linen shirt, so at least there’s that.  
  
His captor nods towards one of his henchmen and the Martin formerly known as Baldie severs the plastic strips binding Xabi’s wrists.  
  
“If you’re after a ransom from Chamartín, I’m afraid you’re wasting your time,” Xabi starts, as if to gain some sort of upper hand in the conversation. He rubs his stinging eyes between his thumb and his index finger. “Engineers who can regulate the pressure in their oil pipes are ten a penny. They’ll probably thank you for giving them an excuse to hire a fresh-faced graduate for half price.”  
  
“I bet you were always the smartest kid in the class, weren’t ya?” the man muses, not even bothering to hide how much he’s ignoring Xabi’s rationality. “Must be pretty frustrating, I reckon. Walking around this world having to deal with people who are, at best, just a step behind… just a fraction of a second slower. But you learn to cope. Then you learn it’s not too bad, there’s advantages as long as you learn to adapt; so you start reading the cues, smiling at almost the right time, taking a bit of an interest in their mindless bullshit here and there… Suddenly, you have them eating out of the palm of your hand and thinking it’s _their_ idea in the first place…”  
  
“Did you bring me here to psychoanalyze me? Awfully chatty for a mercenary.”  
  
The stranger smiles.  
  
“I’ll take that as a compliment since we’re practically in the same business, you and me. We’re both professionals at the top of our game who provide a valuable service.”  
  
 _Well, OK. I can ignore you too._  
  
“I’m not exactly… familiar with the protocol, but I’m guessing it’s Chamartín’s money you’re after. They’ll tell you to fuck off, but I suppose it’s worth a punt.”  
  
“I don’t intend to ask Chamartín for a damn thing. Got everything I need right here. Xabier...,” he draws out the name, as if he’s trying it out to see how it fits on his tongue.  
  
“Well, if you can afford to be this picky, your options are pretty limited. My parents died before I graduated from university. My brother is a writer so, needless to say, he owes me a lot of money I’ll never see again.”  
  
“He’s a talented poet, your Mikel, isn’t he?”  
  
Xabi’s stomach drops and for all his determination, he _knows_ it must be showing on his face, knows he’s lost this round already.  
  
“I wouldn’t be the one to have an opinion on poetry, but a bloke who goes to the same café on Playa de la Concha every single day, carrying a sheaf of papers and his cigarettes, must be pretty dedicated to his craft.”  
  
There’s something akin to rage building up in the pit of Xabi’s stomach now as he can feel the self-satisfaction oozing off of his tormentor. His bearded jaw sets even tighter.  
  
“You on the other hand…,” the stranger continues, “you take dedication to a whole new level. Two PhDs before the age of thirty in between tours of the world’s oil fields… Regulating pressure in oil pipes must be fascinating. Me, I’m looking forward to hearing _aaaall_ about it in the time we’ll spend together.”  
  
“My entire body of work is on the internet, if you’re _that_ into peer review,” Xabi says, regaining his regal composure. “You don’t need me here for that.”  
  
“Yes, well… Funny thing about that…Your research...”  
  
He gets up from the chair he’d been straddling and smoothly hops on Xabi’s side of the table, resting a thick thigh close to Xabi’s forearm.  
  
“You were a bright, promising prospect when you graduated, got the old crusty fellows at The Journal of Essential Oil Research in a bit of a freak-out with some of your research ideas… Then you suddenly stopped. Maybe understandably chose the more profitable freelance gigs over academia. You kept a private microlab in your London loft though; custom-built, maybe just an expensive plaything, in between jazz concerts and Hackney screenings of black and white films. About three months ago you vanished just as suddenly. Abandoned a newly discovered Cat 1 field in Sierra Leone, a first in your career.”  
  
Xabi feels strangely calmer now, as if there’s truly nothing left to control or fuckup with one wrong look or eyebrow lift. He knows he’s been blessed with a good poker face, something his brother mockingly used to refer to as his Bemused Aristocat Default Expression, and it’s the only card he seems to have now.  
  
“Since you seem to know everything about me already, you probably know that was a… complicated time in my personal life. I don’t really see any reason to explain myself to you though.”  
  
“Here’s only one of the millions of reasons: the revolutionary clean oil refining process you’re developing for Chamartín is extremely… appealing to my client. You could single-handedly spark a new industrial revolution, Xabier. If it works, you’ll make Chamartín the richest and most powerful corporation on the planet and all you’d get would be a Nobel prize and a black tie dinner with the King of Sweden. Now, if you were to… agree to collaborate with my client, there may not be a lot of published research for a Nobel, at least not for a few years, but you could buy the King of Sweden’s youngest daugh… well, son. Hell, buy the whole Royal Family and make them dance and juggle for you for pocket money. You’d be an extremely rich man beyond what any Chamartín director could ever dream of. There’s of course that little problem of the contract you signed with them…”  
  
“Is that what this is? A negotiation?” Xabi puts just the right splash of derision in his question. “I can save you both your time and mine time in that case because whatever it is you’re on about, it’s not going to…”  
  
He doesn’t actually _see_ the man move from his spot. He can only hear the pointed whistle of a knife leaving from his thigh holster and embedding itself so close to Xabi’s wrist, he can practically feel its coldness pinning his arm to the table. There are two holes in his best tropical vacation shirt now, but that’s the least of his problems.  
  
His captor’s lanky body folds over Xabi’s chair to bring their faces level; he can smell him, clean and rich and warm, an unsettling contrast with his icy blue eyes.  
  
“I can make you feel pain in ways you can’t even imagine pain can be felt,” he murmurs low in Xabi’s ear.  
Xabi follows his eyes, curses himself when he realizes they’re set on his wildly fluttering pulse under the skin of his neck. For a brief second, the man looks surprised at something he sees on Xabi’s face, then merely… amused.  
  
He yanks the knife from Xabi’s shirt sleeve and stands up straight, his voice returning to its regular setting of flippant.  
  
“I can see you’re scared and that’s smart of you. You have every reason to be, but whether I hurt you or not it’s entirely up to you. We’ll give you some time to have a think about that.”  
  
Presumably his lackeys know the script very well because they follow him quietly out of the bunker, leaving Xabi with nothing but concrete to stare at for the foreseeable future.  
  
 _Well… fuck._


	3. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where you're going has no signs  
> And you're not going in a straight line

_“Buenos días… Despierta mi bella durmiente”._  
  
Xabi is about to tell Mikel to fuck off and hold off their mother for just five more minutes before his eyelids finally shake off the last traces of his uneasy sleep. He startles off the army barrack bed wondering why on Earth his pain in the ass brother has started speaking with an Argentinian accent, but the bad dream comes back into focus under the neon lights.  
  
Dinner, or what he assumed was dinner judging by how sleepy he got after, had consisted of what he’d grudgingly admit was not too horrible military rations when you’re hungry and thirsty, and had been served by Baldie in perfect silence, which was just fine by Xabi. The man gave him the creeps. The new guy is shorter, stockier, decidedly more Argentinian and has a far more liberal attitude to shaving.  
  
 _“Compliments of the chef. My name is Javier Mascherano and I’m here to make sure you eat. El Jefe put me in charge to make sure you don’t go on some kind of noble but stupid crusade to keep those fuckers’ secrets.”_  
  
Xabi doesn’t say anything, rubs his now full on beard and grabs the water bottle that’s by far the most appealing item on his breakfast tray.   
  
 _“Very thoughtful man, your boss. Why’d he send you, did he think I’d get sentimental?”_  
  
 _“Nah, I’m the most annoying one he’s got, ‘s all, weapon of mass irritation. If you don’t eat, I’m going to break into song. How do you feel about reggaeton?”_  
  
It’s by far the quickest breakfast of Xabi’s life.  
  
They leave him be for a while and he’s busy counting the cracks in the cement ceiling when the bunker door opens again.  
  
“Do you have a name, or should I just keep thinking of you as The Scouse Jackass?”  
  
Xabi’s eyes never leave the ceiling.  
  
“Steven Gerrard, Scouse Jackass only to close friends.”  
  
Out of the corner of his eye, Xabi sees that Gerrard has placed his Macbook Pro on the table.  
  
“Thought you might need this.”  
  
Xabi gets up grudgingly, runs his fingers over the silver rim of the keyboard with a certain degree of nonchalance that he hopes won’t betray how desperately bored he is.  
  
“No wi-fi?”  
  
“Our tech guys gave it a good scrub and wiped it all clean after they couldn’t find anything with even a whiff of oil, nothing on any oil-refining process. Sorry about all the emo boybands.”  
  
“They’re not boyb…,” Xabi bites the tip of his tongue two seconds too late. “Was all of this really necessary?” His voice is in a whole new world of dulcet tones all of a sudden. “Chamartín is just a bank account that keeps my research funded. I might have been a little more cooperative if you drove me to a nice little beach bungalow instead of sticking me in a cage with the tattoo twins.”  
  
Gerrard lifts an eyebrow, entirely unconvinced.  
  
“There’s no time like the present to start cooperating. We already know that Chamartín asks you for periodical handovers of all the data from your research and test results. It’s stored on their servers, there’s ways to get to that. But they can’t do anything with it because they don’t know how to put it together, that’s all in your head. Good thing we have that,” he shoves his hands in his pockets casually.  
  
It’s only now that Xabi notices he’s not carrying any weapons, there’s no leg holster anymore and no tattooed or Argentinian goon in sight either. Xabi’s under no illusion that his three-mile swim each morning for the last five years is any match for this man though, there’s just something in his bearing that would force anyone to think twice about trying their luck.  
  
“If you want to keep it attached to your neck,” Gerrard continues, now headed towards the entrance, “you better start typing soon.”  
  
“I want my glasses,” Xabi says matter-of-factly, making Gerrard turn on his booted heels.  
  
“I had my reading glasses in my laptop bag. I might consider your offer if my head stops aching from having to squint in this dungeon.”  
  
“Maybe.”  
  
“Maybe?!?”  
  
Gerrard’s mouth curls just the slightest bit.  
  
“I don’t trust a man who has no porn on his work laptop.”  
  
~  
“Bored yet?”  
  
 _Fuck yes, there’s not even bloody Solitaire left on this laptop, nevermind a single episode of The Wire._  
  
The freckly, less homicidal-looking of the tattoo twins takes a seat across from Xabi with a slightly naughty glint in his eye while the bald meat mountain watches disapprovingly. Mohawk Man is holding a deck of cards in one hand and Xabi’s black-rimmed glasses in the other.  
  
“Heard you want your glasses,” Mascherano says from behind him in the thickest South American accent Xabi’s ever heard from someone attempting to speak English. “Like to play for them? Is to warn you from now that Dagger cheats like a puta though.”  
  
“I thought your boss’ plan was to break me down with boredom. Would he approve of you entertaining the prisoner?”  
  
“I won’t tell him if you don’t,” Dagger winks and Xabi’s beginning to wonder if this is some twisted Good Cop Bad Cop scheme devised by Gerrard to break his spirit. “And he’s not my… It’s more of a… partnership. We’re all going through some severe fucking cabin fever here…”  
  
“Agger…”  
  
 _It speaks!_  
  
Not for very long though as Agger silences the oddly beautiful but terrifying looking man with a single cheeky look and a defiant:  
  
“You afraid you’ll get your ass kicked by a nerd?”  
  
~  
  
Xabi’s earlier misgivings about Dagger’s intentions are obliterated by the speed with which the next two hours of his life pass by compared to his previous staring at nineteen shades of concrete activities. He’s completely engrossed in his hand of cards, his shirt sleeves rolled up, his brow furrowed, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth.  
  
Mascherano, who is currently peering at Xabi with a cross-eyed stare from behind the glasses he’d won off of Dagger in the previous round, had had a good laugh earlier when Xabi’d won his first cigarette with a spectacular full house.  
  
“I quit smoking almost three years ago. I would have never bothered if I knew I’d end up with you lot,” Xabi almost moaned in pleasure after his first lungful of poison.  
  
He’s won a couple more hands in between two or three won by the (apparently) Slovakian sphinx, but aside from Mascherano winning Xabi’s glasses, it’s been pretty much all Dagger for the better part of the last hour.  
  
“This is against every tenet of statistics…”  
  
“Che, is called cheating like a pro. _Ya te dije que este cabrón_ …”  
  
“Fuck off, Evita, I know that word,” Dagger smirks, stubbing his latest cigarette on the aged wood of the table.  
  
Xabi studies their faces. He feels like he’s in a pack of wolves where the young betas are jostling around taking practice bites off each other while the Alpha is away.  
  
“Have you all known each other a long time?”  
  
“Are you trying to bond with the boys, Alonso?”  
  
Dagger squints at him suspiciously.  
  
“Just killing time. I don’t doubt you can tell me and still shoot me in the head without even blinking.”  
  
“True,” he confirms as if to remind himself. “I met the boss in Afghanistan. Allegedly,” Dagger purses his lips expressively, folding his hand. “Since neither of us was officially there… And we both met this hijo de puta in the seediest dump of a sailors’ pub in Zanzibar.”  
  
Xabi’s eyes pause for an uncomfortable long moment on the Slovakian who surprises absolutely nobody by remaining completely motionless, save for the cards he throws on the table.  
  
“He came with the job,” Mascherano clarifies while remaining as vague as possible.  
  
“Is he always this chatty?”  
  
“Just deal,” the bald man says coldly, his eyes boring holes into Xabi.  
  
Xabi proceeds to do just that when a muffled but undeniably powerful thud echoes through the bunker. He feels the air shifting around him with lightning speed, the pack now fully alert.  
  
The Slovakian barks an order at Mascherano who, for whatever hierarchical reason Xabi can’t quite grasp yet, waits for a silent nod from Dagger before he sets Xabi’s glasses on the table and goes out to check the commotion. Dagger grabs his walkie talkie, gives it a few nervous clicks, but the only feedback he gets is static.  
Everything happens with such dizzying speed next that Xabi feels like he’s in one of his advanced physics classes again; he fully expects old, certifiable Mr. Hudson to materialize next to them and ramble about time contracting and dilating. It’s contracting faster and faster on Xabi as the tattooed forearm of the Slovakian wraps itself tight around his neck and he watches the man’s other arm pull a gun on Dagger.  
  
“Put your gun on the floor and get out! Now!” His voice thunders menacingly, too close to Xabi’s ear. “Get Gerrard and tell him if he doesn’t show up in two minutes, I’ll put a bullet through his paycheck’s head.”  
  
Dagger’s face is completely blank as he complies and walks out with his hands up, while Xabi is stuck inside with the parasite attached to his back. Every move he’s tried to make to struggle free of his grasp has only increased the pressure on his larynx and he’s done pushing his luck for now.  
  
“Martin, cell 5. Come in. I got Alonso,” Martin informs someone at the other end of his com station.  
Xabi can’t make out the response, if there’s any, because he’s being dragged towards the exit, from where sounds of gunshots are echoing louder and louder. He’s desperately looking around for something to grab once they’re out in the concrete tunnel, but the walls are barren and cold and Baldie has the tip of his Beretta shoved painfully into his aorta.  
  
In the next instant, a bullet lodges itself so close to Xabi’s ear, he can feel the concrete dust ricochet from the wall and settle onto the side of his face. Martin spins both of them around, his arm stiff and looking to lock onto a target. The last thing Xabi sees clearly is Gerrard pointing a gun at both of them. There is a second, louder, shrill explosion splitting the stuffy air of the tunnel and Xabi closes his eyes, fully expecting a Zapruder reel of his life to flash before his eyes. There’s nothing but darkness instead of images of fishing in his grandpa’s boat or throwing stones with Mikel at unsuspecting spectators in the lower stands of Anoeta or his first kiss; when he opens his eyes, a thick, warm wave hits his cheek and his neck. Xabi tastes salt and metal on the side of his mouth and he has a second or two to realize what’s happening as Martin slumps against the wall and eventually drags him down to the floor with him. By the time they hit the deck, the Slovakian’s blood still running down Xabi’s face, his eyes are completely empty and his python grip on Xabi’s neck finally loosens.  
  
The adrenaline in his system makes Xabi so jittery that for a moment he just flaps desperately under the dead weight pinning half his body to the floor, but he’s quickly on his feet once Gerrard picks him up by the scruff of his shirt.  
  
Xabi’s mouth is trying to form an interrogative, but his brain is still short-circuiting like a submerged switchboard.  
His lips move, but his voice is helplessly lost.  
  
“I never liked him,” Gerrard almost shrugs once he gives Xabi a onceover to convince himself all the blood  
splashed on him is Martin’s.  
  
“We need to go. NOW!”


	4. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'm a thrillseeker, honey, I can't help it...

“Where are we going?”  
  
The part of Xabi’s brain that’s in charge of kinetic processes is hopping mad with excitement after two days spent in lock-up; it’s fueling artificial energy into his attempt at walking briskly enough in front of Gerrard so as to avoid bumping into him.  
  
“Away from the people shooting at us. Left,” he points with his automatic rifle towards his chosen branch of the concrete burrow.  
  
Sure enough, an errant bullet destroys the nearest LED light above their heads, sending white hot sparks cascading all around them.  
  
Xabi can’t quite see what Gerrard’s doing behind him, but whatever mechanism he’s just activated by shoving the butt of his gun into a spot on the wall opens a trap door into the ceiling. When Xabi spins on his heels, he’s faced with a rickety-looking iron contraption that looks like it may have seen better days as a fire escape ladder. His eyes follow it up all the way to what he truly hopes is anything but a dark, cramped ventilation duct Gerrard will inevitably want him to crawl through.  
  
“Behind you...,” he shouts breathlessly in the very next instant and Gerrard’s instincts kick in, needing no further context to the warning. There are two shots, but Xabi has no idea who’s just shot whom until he sees the assailant who had crept in from behind the corner sprawled on the floor and Gerrard kneeling over his body, scavenging whatever weapons and information he can find.  
  
“Start climbing and crawl as fast as you can, I’ll tell you when to stop.”  
  
There’s a very brief debate raging in Xabi’s brain, one that’s not made easy by the lack of context, but it comes to an abrupt end with a fresh round of gunfire to which Gerrard responds in kind from his kneeling position around the corner. His mouth is already open to bark another order, but Xabi’s halfway up the shaky rungs by then.  
  
Predictably, the ventilation duct is everything Xabi had imagined it to be, plus air that smells and tastes of age-old mold. He has the adrenaline pumping furiously through his system to thank for the speed with which he crawls to nowhere, in complete darkness at first. He stops for a moment when he realizes the gunfire has been silenced, thoughts of his next move should Gerrard happen to be dead crashing into each other like domino pieces. The next sound Xabi hears is the creak of a giant tin can being open and shut. The stairs being pulled back... which can only mean…  
  
“Keep moving!”  
  
He does, with a pang of disappointment, but grateful for the small wonders a thin ray of torchlight can do to one’s mental comfort when one is crawling on all fours through an airless ventilation pipe. Xabi doesn’t get the chance to curse Gerrard or whine a petulant _Are we there yet???_ , or both, after the most unpleasant twenty minutes of his life because four thuds drummed in succession into the shaft extinguish the light and make way for a strident screech followed by glorious sunshine he sees falling on Gerrard right behind him. The first face that greets Xabi once he follows him through the now open shaft is Mohawk Man, who looks even more like the leader of a punk band called _Mercenary Jackass_ now that Xabi can finally squint at him through daylight rather than neon. His thigh is bleeding, but Xabi seems to be the only one who pays any attention to it.  
  
The heat blinds him even more than the light, but in the few seconds it takes his lungs to readjust to the humidity, the hotness and the smells of the jungle creeping in all around them, the two men in front of him are already exchanging supplies, ammunition and rapid fire questions and answers of which Xabi can barely make some sense.  
  
Both bullets and answers come mostly from Dagger’s direction.  
  
“Masche is down, not breathing. I’ll cover this flank, you need to be on the move while they’re still busy looking for you underground.”  
  
“How many choppers?”  
  
“One. Didn’t see the type. Sweeping options are pretty limited, but they’ll start soon. I’ll leave a South East trail.”  
  
Gerrard nods once, his hands working on autopilot to organize all the possibly lethal knickknacks handed to him by his underling.  
  
“Alpha rendezvous point is about 30 clicks South West,” Dagger concludes.  
  
“We’ll walk until Alpha can get a tracking signal and do our best to stay out of their way.”  
  
“Who’s they?” Xabi asks, still a bit too dazed to think of more logical questions such as _Who the fuck are YOU, people?_  
  
They go on ignoring Xabi’s civilian curiosity and his very civilian existence and Gerrard empties a pistol he pulls form his leg holster, throwing it to Dagger. The Dane finally acknowledges Xabi in mid-catch for as long as it takes to rip off a chunk of his right shirt sleeve soiled by the dead Slovakian. The bloodied shirt sleeve tears easily under his tattooed fingers and Dagger shoves this token in his backpack along with Gerrard’s empty pistol.  
  
“Can you carry this?” he points to a bulky looking black backpack as Gerrard already slinks his on his shoulders.  
  
“I’m not bloody incapacitated! Can someone tell me what is going…”  
  
Xabi goes back to being ignored as soon as Dagger shoves the heavy pack into his arms.   
  
“I’ll see you at the Alpha rendezvous spot. I’ll… try to get Masche’s body,” he says to Gerrard and the Scouser looks down at his rifle one last time for the road, shielding his eyes from Xabi.  
  
“Try not to join him.”  
  
One exchange of curt nods and Mohawk Man is off into the jungle. Xabi doesn’t even need to be yelled at to move, his still wired limbs follow Gerrard in the opposite direction out of their own accord.  
  
There’s very little in the way of conversation to be had for the next exhausting, humid and miserable two hours that feel like weeks to Xabi, so he keeps his eyes trained on the widening sweat spot darkening the back of Gerrard’s tshirt, right between his shoulder blades. Xabi imagines it as an oil spill that will drown him any minute, then it becomes a shooting target luring Xabi to crave a gun for the first time in his life every time he trips on another mossy root on the jungle floor. The most satisfying by far would be to strangle him with his bare hands, Xabi thinks, if only he could believe for a second he had any chance of overpowering the anatomy textbook lithe muscles stretching minutely under the Scouser’s tanned skin.  
  
He’s too lost in his murderous thoughts to notice the sounds of temporary absolution, but once Xabi sees the clear river bubbling through fallen tree trunks, his homicidal urges are replaced by a warm wave of relief.  
  
“Fill up your canteens, we’re not staying here.”  
  
“Oh, there’s a _we_ now?” Xabi chuckles bitterly, wiping the sweat from his brow with his only intact sleeve. “You’re free to go wherever the hell you want, I’m staying right here for a while. Adios,” he spits out and it’s so satisfying, he wishes he could say it again without sounding too much like a drama queen.  
  
“We have about four hours of daylight left,” Gerrard says, dropping his own backpack to the ground a little sluggishly. “A water course is the first place anybody would look for you, but you’re welcome to camp here if you don’t mind the wildlife coming out to hunt at night.”  
  
“You know what…” Xabi stops for a moment, watching another dark spot on Gerrard’s tshirt, one that's a different shade of darkness and seems to impede his otherwise all business movements as he resupplies water from the stream. “I’m walking through a heat oven through the bloody jungle with no idea about who wants to kill me _today_ , you’re bleeding from your side and I have a dead man’s fucking _brains_ drying off on my neck. I think I’ll take my chances. _I_ ’m taking a break.”  
  
Xabi’s proud of how resolute he sounds and it seems effective enough to shut Gerrard up while he’s frantically scrubbing the dried up blood from the back of his neck. The water cools him off both on the outside and the inside. It feels like he can’t drink enough, but once he does, he reaches for one of the military rations from his backpack, determined to enjoy life’s little pleasures.  
  
Gerrard’s sitting on a rock a few feet across from him and Xabi watches quietly as he peels his tshirt off revealing a dark red stream gushing down his ribs. He’s not sure exactly what to do so he tries to keep himself busy with his early dinner until he notices Gerrard splashing alcohol on his fingers and attempting in vain to reach back towards the bloodied gash. Xabi walks to the water, his appetite thoroughly ruined, and strides back to Gerrard once his hands are washed. He can see how tense Gerrard’s wiry body is as soon as he approaches him, but gives him a reassuring hand wave as he grabs the alcohol from the Englishman’s open backpack and disinfects his own hands.  
  
“Unless Mohawk Man packed a mirror for you in there, I think you need my help,” he says, waiting to feel the last waft of alcohol evaporate on his fingers, somewhat regretfully.  
  
Gerrard acknowledges it silently by sitting down on his rock again, his back turned to Xabi this time. Xabi kneels by his side, his breath hitching in his throat at the sight of what must once have been deep trenches in the man’s back. There are old burn marks randomly sprayed all around his sternum and his ribs, all the way up to his muscular arms, as if someone had used his body as an ashtray. Xabi tries to keep his eyes on the bleeding wound instead, blood he can handle much better.  
  
“My brother managed to shove a broken, rusty fork through his big toe when we were playing football on the beach one summer,” Xabi says conversationally as he softly cleanses the half-dry stream of blood down Gerrard’s ribs and back with the clean cloth he had prepared for himself earlier. “There wasn’t a lot of blood at first, but when I pulled the sharp bit out it started flowing out like... like a geyser.”  
  
“Were you any good at it?”  
  
“Obviously not, but he managed to keep his toe, so…”  
  
“No… were you any good at football?”  
  
“Nothing special. Mikel was always the talented one, he played for a local junior team for a while, he was a monster of an attacking mid. Then he became a poet, but the straight one of the family, which always confuses people… That’s my brother for you, walking contradiction.”  
  
The tips of Xabi’s fingers are icy cold from the disinfectant and the slight tremor on the expanse of light golden skin they brush every now and then is the only reaction he can see. He wants to ask if it hurts, it must sting like fuck, but Xabi keeps his mind on sunny days at the beach instead even as he parts the small cut the bullet tore in his captor’s skin. Unlike all the other kids in their five-a-side, Xabi hadn’t even blinked at the sight of blood; he’d studied the sharp metal in great detail in the back of his frantic parents’ car on the way to the hospital and even kept the offending fork prong in a wooden box by his bedside for years to come.  
  
“You can… You have to look for shrapnel,” Gerrard says, his voice gravely. “It didn’t hit any ribs, but if there’s any leftovers it might get infected.”  
  
Xabi meets his eyes for a second, just enough to want to look away as fast as possible, and splashes some more disinfectant on his hand before he quite unmetaphorically gets under Gerrard’s skin, moving his index finger as slowly as possible into the open wound. His eyes are back on his impromptu patient’s face despite himself, but Gerrard continues to suffer through the process quietly; his nostrils flaring are the only sign of the intense pain he must be in.  
  
Xabi exhales and leans back on his haunches, smiling crookedly at the twisted piece of metal he’s holding up to the sun.  
  
“I feel like the… what do the English call it… like the tooth fairy. If you didn’t take my wallet, I could leave money for you tomorrow morning.”  
  
Gerrard raises an eyebrow, probably wondering how his life has gotten to _this_ , and busies himself with wrapping a tight bandage around his torso. That's something with which Xabi has zero experience, but which judging by the amount of scar tissue on Gerrard, he should be just fine with handling that part by himself.  
  
“Thanks,” Gerrard mumbles into the neck of the clean tshirt he’s pulling over his head once he’s done bandaging his wound. To Xabi’s dismay, he also starts packing everything into his backpack and looks like he’s expecting Xabi to do the same.  
  
“Did you get those scars in Afghanistan?” Xabi’s staring at his hands, dimly aware that he still has the other man’s blood on them.  
  
He gets a withering look for that, but doesn’t give a shit really.  
  
“The tattooed guy…”  
  
“Dagger talks too much,” Gerrard cuts him off, focusing a bit too hard on opening the cap of the antibiotic bottle he’s twisting between his fingers.  
  
“He didn’t have to say anything, really. I suppose when you were promising me pain the other day, I knew somehow.”  
  
“I was a long-range sniper. Capturing one is every Taliban’s wet dream.”  
  
It’s obvious Gerrard would rather leave it at that, but the surprise in Xabi’s eyes won’t let the ellipsis just hang in the air. “Some people’s special skills include crochet or playing the cello. Mine was blowing heads off from 1,200 yards,” he clarifies, popping two pills into his mouth. “Happy now?”  
  
“Actually, no,” Xabi presses on, adjusting the straps on his backpack. “I’d like to know who it is we’re running from. I mean, how many people can possibly want to kidnap me in the same week?”  
  
“I didn’t kidnap you.”  
  
“You fucking shot me and tied me up to a chair. I’m pretty sure that’s the technical definition…”  
  
“If I tell you, will you start walking and stop talking?”  
  
There’s something in Gerrard’s voice that warns Xabi about a possible wind-up, his eyes are already trailing off towards the tropical treeline.  
  
“Deal,” Xabi says in the off chance he’s not getting taken for (yet another) ride.  
  
Then he hears it. Whatever it was that Gerrard was staring at before is not quite above them yet, but Xabi recognizes the rhythmical swish before either of them can actually see the source of the humming.  
  
“Fucking _move_ , Alonso!”  
  
He does and fast.  
  
“I think I liked you better when you used to call me Sir,” he growls at Gerrard’s retreating back.  
  
Gerrard is leading them away from the water and into the thickness of the jungle, but it doesn’t take more than three minutes before the trees above them start swirling around under the helicopter pallets threatening to trim the lush Comino trees. The shooting starts again, although anybody who’s ever attempted to hit moving targets zigzagging through dense foliage would probably call it a crapshoot at best. Three minutes is all it takes this time though because Xabi recognizes vaguely another sound, this time thundering and sharp. He watches Gerrard making a beeline for the edge of the nearest clump of vegetation, escaping a fresh round of artillery from above, and he knows already what invisible choice lays before him. Once they’re past the last Cominos, they can finally see as well as hear the waterfall.  
  
“They don’t have enough fuel autonomy, probably weren't expecting a chase. They’ll have to land in a few minutes and they’ll find a clearing soon enough,” Gerrard yells over the mayhem surrounding them.  
  
“I hope you’re not suggesting what I think you’re suggesting.”  
  
“Drop your backpack in first, it’s waterproof!”  
  
When it becomes obvious Xabi has no intention of doing such a thing, Gerrard grabs his backpack without much debate and tosses it into the very last visible strip of smooth river they can hear tumbling off a cliff, right after his own.  
  
“ _I_ ’m not!” Xabi objects, horrified.  
  
A bullet whistling closer to their heads than any so far this round sends him ridiculously close to the precipice and the sheer distance from which the vapor clouds seem to travel upwards from the void makes his stomach want to crawl out through his throat.  
  
Gerrard shoots in the general direction of the propeller he can barely see through the trees, but it’s a half-assed effort, like he's just making a point.  
  
“They need you alive! They’d prefer to catch _me_ dead, I’m not turning into a target practice dummy for you. Now JUMP!”  
  
“For all I know, they’re here to rescue me from _you_!” Xabi’s right arm flails about in exasperation. “I’m not jumping into an abyss because the man who bloody kidnapped me says so!”  
  
He doesn’t get much time to even finish his tirade though.  
  
“Take a _deep_ breath, get as much air into your lungs as you can,” Gerrard instructs, seemingly on autopilot.  
  
“When you hit the water start kicking up with your legs and grab the first rock you can reach as hard as you can. You have to fight the current, do NOT let go until I come to get you!”  
  
“Are you deaf? I’m not going to hit any water because there is no fucking way I’m…”  
  
Not for the first time this godforsaken day, events speed up beyond Xabi’s control. At least this time there’s an element of novelty when he feels Gerrard’s hand grabbing the back of his neck the instant before his mouth is on Xabi's, kissing him roughly, perhaps a little counterproductive to his breathe deep instructions. Xabi thinks he hears a bullet flying right above their heads, but that’s the least of his worries when he is literally swept off his feet and the solid ground he was standing on just a second before is replaced by vapor-soaked air. 


	5. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I keep reaching up  
> But they drag me back down  
> Wherever I try to hide  
> I will always be found

“You _pushed_ me. Into a fucking waterfall!”  
  
The disbelief mixed with outrage bubbling in Xabi’s voice bounces off the walls of the cave. If he were to be completely honest, Xabi’s slightly pissed off at himself for: a) not using Gerrard’s hand as he pulled him off the rock Xabi’d grabbed as instructed in order to throw his ass into the river and b) following him into the cave behind the waterfall as if it’s no biggie, just two buddies spelunking on their day off. He blames shock and oxygen deprivation for that one. He can tell Gerrard’s not exactly giving a shit by the way he’s sort of staring at the curtain of cascading water a few feet over Xabi’s shoulder, waiting to catch his breath.   
  
“I would have gladly shot you with a tranq dart again instead, if you think that’s more… humane, but I don’t think I have the energy to carry you through the jungle right now, sorry.”  
  
“This is ridiculous. I’m running away from people who are probably trying to save me from a psychopathic mercenary… the least I could do is get some answers instead of more _mierda_.”  
  
He seems to weigh that thought for another moment before he starts to run towards the water, yelling _¡Aquí estamos!_ to nobody in particular.  
  
He only gets to say it once though before one hand clamps around his mouth and the other encircles his waist and he’s slammed against the cave wall with Gerrard’s body cushioning the contact with the cold rock. It’s not that anybody would hear Xabi scream from behind hundreds of gallons of water tumbling to the ground anyway, but in the off chance someone landed to look for them, it’s being seen rather than heard that worries Gerrard.   
  
“Even _if_ they were stupid enough to try to land and see if we ever surfaced,” his voice is steel cold and steady in Xabi’s ear, “your saviors are the last people whose attention you want to attract right now. I know smart people are some of the dumbest fucks you’ll ever meet, but you must have noticed by now I’m trying to keep you alive, Alonso! The least you could do is try to not get in my way.”  
  
Gerrard can feel the wave of tension uncoiling from Xabi’s core against his stomach, although it’s obviously powered by helplessness rather than any sort of trust. He knows he hasn’t earned that yet. His palm slides off down the other man’s bearded jaw.  
  
“We had a deal,” Xabi says, breathing deep through his nose once Gerrard releases him from his grip. “You can probably see how I’d have a hard time following you around after you kidna…”  
  
“I’m an officer of the Secret Intelligence Service of the United Kingdom.”  
  
Xabi blinks a few times as if he’s staring at an incoming train because really, what exactly does one say to that.  
  
“The United… _what_?!?”  
  
“MI6,” Gerrard clarifies with a slight note of aggravation in his voice.   
  
He watches Xabi run his hand through his wet beard, then nodding a couple of times to himself.   
  
“Sure. Why not?” He’s dead serious it’s just his voice that’s chuckling on the inside.  
  
“We don’t exactly carry a badge and a letter from the Queen on undercover missions, if that’s what…”  
  
“So what does the United Kingdom’s government want with me?”  
  
“Ever wondered why Chamartín was the only oil company willing to pour millions into your research? Or how one of the smaller players in the business can afford it when all the majors decided it was too risky of an investment?”  
  
“Not really. What does that have to do with…”  
  
“It’s not you we’re after,” Gerrard says, “it’s your CEO, Señor Pérez. His answer to the economic crisis was to get funding by laundering money for an Asian crime syndicate we’ve been monitoring for years. It’s called Operation Emperador because fucking JIC bureaucrats love naming things so they can pretend there’s glamour in their pencil-pushing.”   
  
Alonso’s no longer rooted to the spot, but pacing a little from side to side, his right hand twisting his now transparent shirt in a death grip above his hip. Gerrard’s more than happy to let him mull it over, sensing an opening cracking a bit wider.   
  
“About three months ago, the flow of funds we’ve been tracking suddenly spiked. It led us to you. This was supposed to be an extraction mission to take you away from the people who hired you, but well… Needless to say, this operation is now severely fucked up.”  
  
The tinge of hurt professional pride playing across Gerrard’s face along with distorted sunrays dancing on the cave walls catches Xabi’s eyes. He stops pacing.   
  
“So what you are telling me is… You’re a good guy?”  
  
“It’s probably best to think of me as the less bad guy as far as your survival chances are concerned.”  
  
“How do I know this isn’t another part you are playing?”  
  
“You don’t,” Gerrard concedes, “You’ll get your empirical evidence next time someone tries to put a bullet through you and my ribs get in the way.”  
  
They both know that’s not enough, but it will have to do for now.  
  
“So if you didn’t try to kidnap me from Chamartín for a reward, was that them shooting at us? At you,” Xabi duly corrects himself.   
  
“I did kidnap you from Chamartín actually. That’s what your buddy Pérez hired me for, we had to move quickly on the market once the word got out he was looking for a crew for a special project. Chamartín’s board has no idea about the syndicate; Pérez runs double books with his CFO to hide his debts, and this new oil refining technology you’re inventing for the company is too precious of an asset to be kept out of his little black book.”  
  
He sees it now, the minute shift in the way the odd light of the cave catches Xabi’s intelligent eyes, the narrowing of his eyelids. Almost there…  
  
“There wasn’t going to be any published research, any Nobel Prize, Xabi.”   
  
Steven regrets the use of his first name at first, knows he’s still on edge, but there’s no going back now. “Your brilliant invention was going to be a bargaining chip between a group of criminals and any crackpot dictator who could move his oil undetected by any embargo thanks to your boss.”  
  
“I’d never…”  
  
“That’s why you weren’t going to be around to ask any questions; Pérez wasn’t going to take any chances with an honest man. I wasn’t hired just to get the last pieces of the puzzle missing from the company’s servers. I was hired to kill you once I got it.”  
  
Gerrard chews the inside of his cheek, suddenly aware of how hoarse his voice is from talking a bit more than he’s used to on an average Thursday.   
  
“Is your name even Steven Gerrard?”  
  
“Technically, it’s Major Steven Gerrard,” he chuckles and if he’s honest, he has to give it to Alonso, not many would react to the whole barrage of information quite in this way. “Steven’s fine.”  
  
“Were you actually going to torture me?”  
  
“Depending on how stubborn you’d have got… Was counting on you being pig-headed for a bit longer while we were arranging to get you out of the country from under Pérez’s nose. The whole thing…” Steven shoves his hands in his wet pockets, a bit apologetically. “There was no time to get in and get hired through a trustworthy intermediary after you switched the experiment location from Guyana to Colombia overnight. Threw us off a bit, to be honest. That’s how we ended up stuck with one of Pérez’s men, the Slovakian was his gorilla. Couldn’t shake him off because he didn’t trust us.”  
  
Xabi frowns at the shimmering screen of water falling to the ground behind them.   
  
“It wasn’t my idea. The lab in Georgetown was better equipped, but Pérez made the switch. He said the company had much better infrastructure in Colombia and offshore testing was more complicated anyway.”  
  
“How convenient. That way your disappearance could be blamed on the usual suspects out here. Nobody outside Guyana can even find it on a map… What are you doing?”  
  
Steven’s eyes finally move from the washed out blood stains on Xabi’s shirt to take in what it is he’s doing with it. It’s already lying on the cave floor at his feet and Xabi’s moved on to take his shoes off in the meantime.  
  
“Our backpacks are at the bottom.”  
  
“Yes, I’ll get…”  
  
“You don’t even know if the bleeding’s stopped. They’re probably settled in the middle where there are no currents, I know where it’s easier to swim to them,” Xabi straightens up once he’s done with his shoes, which are wet anyway but at least won’t weigh extra on his little expedition.“I grew up on the beach, it’s the crazy free diving I was objecting to, not the water itself,” he adds, sounding exactly like a man who has something to prove and tries hard not to sound that way.  
  
Once Steven makes sure their pursuers did not in fact risk flying on fumes in the jungle, they retrieve their packs without much difficulty.  
  
“Where to?” Xabi asks.   
  
“We’ll walk downstream while there’s still daylight then camp for the night.  
  
Their trek is mostly silent, although Steven can tell the wheels inside Xabi’s head are spinning by the harsh knit of his brow. It comes as no surprise when Xabi eventually asks:  
  
“So… Agent Gerrard?”  
  
“Steven.”  
  
“Don’t you have a code name?”  
  
“Fucking Ian Fleming…”  
  
Steven breathes a sigh of exasperation and wipes the sweat stinging the back of his neck as he keeps walking one step ahead of Xabi. They’re running out of daylight, if not out of heat.  
  
“You know what you never see James Bond do? File expense reports. Fucking cross-linked _spreadsheets_.”  
  
Xabi is undeterred.   
  
“Have you ever met the Queen?”  
  
“Yeh, I met the Queen. She pinned a medal on me in a concrete bunker under the palace once, with just my boss and her bodyguards around for company.” Steven glances at Xabi and can see he’s a bit deflated, perhaps more disappointed than surprised that even secret agenting is just another job people like to moan about. “She seems like a nice lady. Reminds me of me gran, stern but polite type,” he says, throwing Xabi a bone.   
  
Barely two minutes pass before Xabi is bored again.   
  
“The Argentine… Was he your subordinate?”  
  
“Dagger’s best Latin American contact. He agreed to join us on short notice so we could get in as a full crew.”  
  
“I’m sorry he's… well…”  
  
“Walking, no talking. Your part of the deal,” Steven reminds him, suddenly morose.   
  
The jungle sounds shift noticeably around them as the light dims, though it’s not until it’s completely dark and they’re settling in to eat around the fire Xabi had insisted on engineering into being all by himself that the air becomes suddenly breathable. Steven hadn’t insisted because he wasn’t about to argue about the perfect combustion point of the planned fire, nor about wind velocity, with a crazy person, so he watched Xabi gather the wood and nurture the flames while he changed his bandage.   
  
“You’ve been bleeding, shouldn’t you be resting?” Xabi asks when he notices that Steven has no intention of following his lead with the thermal blanket he’d been relieved to find nestled between a camo jacket and a pack of flares in his bag. Suddenly, the ache in his shoulders where the backpack straps had dug in all day is relieved.   
  
“Unless you want to have a go at nocturnal predators with a rifle, I’ll wake you up before dawn. You can take half a watch.”  
  
Xabi doesn’t really know what that means, but he figures it’s MI6 slang for “I’m planning on taking a nap eventually”.   
  
“I’m actually feeling sleepy,” he eventually speaks from under his blanket.   
  
There’s a distinct lack of reaction from the other side of the fire, not that he’d expected anything else. Xabi keeps staring at whatever stray stars he can make out through the tropical tree canopy. “A man’s brains exploded all over my face this morning and I’m about to call it a day and drift to sleep. Shouldn’t I be… haunted by his dead eyes or something?”  
  
“Are you beating yourself up about not beating yourself up?” Steven asks, and this is possibly the first time Xabi’s heard his erstwhile captor be genuinely surprised about him. Or about anything really.  
  
It feels like a small victory, like there’s at least something Major Gerrard couldn’t read in a file neatly labeled Eng. X. Alonso, which is why Xabi’s thoughts escape out into the night air instead of milling about in his head for a change.   
  
“You have no idea! Songs have been written about this. My… ex,” Xabi corrects himself just in the nick of time, “had all sorts of interesting theories about what he called my bourgeois sense of martyrdom.”  
  
“That the Quique guy?”  
  
Xabi’s head snaps towards the fire, making the foliage underneath him rustle, from the sheer shock of hearing the name uttered by this of all men (albeit it’s technically a completely different name on his lips, something that sounds more like Kicky). He sees Steven throw the dried up grass blade he’s been fiddling with into the flames. _Maybe the painkillers are kicking in_ _hard_ , Xabi thinks, trying to calculate the variables involved in taking his chances and taking off into the jungle if Gerrard should happen to get just a tad loopy.  
  
“Yes… He wrote this song about me before… before we broke up. I tried really hard to treat it as an… uh… backhanded compliment, but the more I listened to the lyrics, the more obvious it became he was personally insulted by everything from my taste in art to my choice of appetizers. And especially by my career.”  
  
“He should have been offended by your taste in men,” Steven says flatly, his eyes never leaving the flames. “I had to tail him one afternoon after he opened the door for a Chamartín courier when you weren’t home, had to make sure he wasn’t making contact with anyone afterwards. Guy’s a pompous bore.”  
  
“You followed Quique around London?!?”   
  
Xabi’s mouth goes slack with disbelief, the mental images taking over his brain in a torrent of horrifying hilarity.   
  
“I paid _eight_ quid for the most fucking horrid, patchouli-smelling cup of tea I’ve ever had and sat on my arse in this ridiculous Ayurveda bookstore somewhere near Clapton... I’m docking it from your Nobel Prize loot when you finally put this thing together, by the way,” Steven glances furtively at Xabi, quickly restraining the quirk of his lips. “What the fuck kind of name for a grown man is Quique anyway?”  
  
“One who’s too cool to be called Enrique like his father,” Xabi laughs, immediately feeling a sharp sting of guilt pricking his insides for even discussing this with a stranger, with _this_ stranger, and especially for feeling completely at ease while doing so. “He’s not… He’s a great man, honestly, and a really talented artist too. We just…” Xabi stops, a frown suddenly curving on his face. “Wait… you had this whole… timeline about my past. Did you do research about every guy I’ve ever slept with…?”  
  
“Yeah, took exactly 30 seconds. And that’s including your Uni years.”  
  
Steven’s years of Special Forces training are the only thing standing between him and a ridiculous follow-up like: _Which makes no sense for a guy who looks like you_ , but then he remembers he’s seen pictures of Alonso’s haircut during his engineering apprenticeship period and combined with him being a colossal nerd, well… Earth logic suddenly applies again.   
  
It takes a while for Xabi’s brain to catch up and figure out that he’s being teased by a man who’d kidnapped him, almost stabbed him, repeatedly threatened him with untold pain (and pushed him into a fucking waterfall) for basically as long as they’ve known each other. He’s not used to feeling this dumb so all he manages as a retort is a meek, silly little snort and a weak _Joder, not all of us went to James Bond Academy_ under his breath, which Steven chooses to ignore.  
  
“I thought you were going to sleep.”  
  
“I am. That’s the problem, remember? I thought… I don’t know, I’ve never seen anyone die, never had anyone’s blood on me. Just thought I’d be more… haunted or something, you know?”  
  
Xabi swallows hard when he realizes his Spanish-inflected question is stupid, of course _he_ knows…  
  
“I’m the one who put a bullet through his head, not you,” Steven says calmly. “But if you’re _really_ hoping to lose sleep over it eventually, there’s plenty of psychological studies with hopeful news for you. Sometimes the shock is… delayed. Maybe six months from now you’ll wake up in a cold sweat, screaming and feeling like your chest is about to get crushed by invisible hammers. If you make it alive by then.”  
  
“Thank you, that’s reassuring,” Xabi says, but his eyes forget to roll in tune with his voice, drifting towards Steven’s completely inscrutable face instead.   
  
He gets his cue that the conversation is essentially over and quietly shifts his arm under his head, the crackling of the fire the last thing he hears before he passes out.


	6. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Baby, work me  
> 'Til I want no more  
> Want you to work me, baby   
> Lord how, make me feel it

Whatever Xabi had imagined the Alpha rendezvous point to be, it was not a small, abandoned hacienda with boarded-up windows, nestled in a clearing at the foot of a mountain. The place is serene, quietly being overrun by nature since the day its previous occupants had forsaken it, and Xabi would find it quite beautiful if he weren’t too exhausted to care by the time they reach it at sundown. There are blood-red roses growing in a half wild tangle over what once used to be paths in a garden.  
  
The inside is an approximation of what the wreck of the Titanic might look like if it ever resurfaced. The air feels as dry as the rustic furniture looks under a layer of dust shining scarlet in the light spread by the petrol lamp Steven finds in the kitchen.   
  
“We’ve got a signal,” Steven says, paying no mind to the hacienda’s strange loveliness, his undivided attention captured by his radio transmitter.   
  
“So where is our taxi?”  
  
“They’ll let us know when they’re ready, the line’s only secured on their end.”  
  
“Don’t call us, we’ll call you?”   
  
Xabi wanders towards an adjacent door, curiosity finally breaking through the torpor of his tiredness. His exploratory excitement at finding the old porcelain bathtub beyond the door dies down quickly when he realizes no water has gone through any of the rusty bathroom fittings in months, possibly years. A spider crawls over his shoe.  When he follows the lamp light back into the salon, he sees that Steven is already settling in nicely. There is an open trap door in the floor, not much different from the one he remembers crawling through at his grandma’s Basque farm forever ago, through which Steven is dragging in a black plastic case.   
  
“The advance team left supplies at the pickup spot, just in case. Take my torch from the backpack if you want to have a look.”  
  
There’s very little imagination in the military mind judging by the all too familiar rations he finds stacked in unmarked boxes, but when he emerges back from the cellar, Xabi has a wide grin on his face and a stash consisting of one pineapple and one clear bottle tucked under his arm.   
  
“If you believe there’s truth in advertising,” he says, peering at the small font on the label from an uncomfortable distance, “there is never a bad time for Aguardiente Antioqueño. Let me find some glasses...”  
  
“I’ll pass, thanks.”  
  
Xabi finally notices Steven is busy with the former contents of the black case which he’s now starting to put together in a puzzle; it spells long-ass sniper rifle even though he’s only about halfway there.   
  
“Are you sure? It’s my turn to keep watch tonight anyway, I think I can manage it with a roof over our heads.”  
  
“You ever had guaro before?” Steven temporarily lifts his eyes from his little lethal project to see Xabi’s face give him all the answer he needs. “If you had, you’d know why I’d never willingly test my gag reflex with it. It tastes like black licorice that’s been already digested a couple of times, fucking revolting…”  
  
Xabi’s already downed his first shot before he ever gets to finish that sentence.   
  
“I’ve had an interesting week,” he shrugs, letting the sickly sweet anise taste swish around his mouth. “I’ll take any alcohol I can get.”  
  
“Just as long as you’re not falling asleep on your watch,” Steven says, balancing himself on one knee before the mini-tripod he’s assembling in front of one of the boarded-up windows. He mounts the rifle to face a wide enough crack in the wood through which a ray of dusk pierces into the salon. “No waking me up if you’re hallucinating pink elephants either.”  
  
Xabi paces himself with his night cap until Steven settles onto the moth-eaten sofa in the middle of room and the house falls silent around him bar the night sounds filtering through from the outside. He sinks into the dusty armchair across the other end of the coffee table with nothing but the green blink of the walkie talkie placed within Steven’s reach to stare at. Well, there’s also Steven. He’s not a pretty sleeper by any stretch of the imagination. Xabi can’t really tell if he’s out yet for a while because he keeps twitching awake until he finally settles into a state that might be sleep, but can’t possibly be rest.   
  
At first, Xabi considers giving him a friendly shoulder shove (or possibly an exorcism) to stop him from jerking and twisting so much, but just as he’s about to drag his feet off the table and walk towards the sofa, he sees Steven’s eyes open wide, fixated on the ceiling in an expression of silent terror. He pants through open lips two, three, four times, like he wants to scream but the sound won’t come out and then his eyes close just as suddenly as they had opened and his body relaxes completely for this first time since Xabi’s met him.  
  
A double shot of aguardiente burns Xabi's throat.   
  
It’s the last thing Xabi remembers when he regains consciousness, awkwardly slumped in his armchair. The air is hot but clean all around him and an evil light stabs at his aching head through the open door. The radio transmitter is gone and so is Gerrard, his only company a now half-empty bottle of anise poison waiting innocently on the table in front of him.   
  
He finds Steven outside, under one of the monumental trees, eating by the small fire he’s tending to.   
  
“Good morning,” Xabi grumbles.   
  
“Hasn’t been morning in a long time. Want some lunch?”  
  
Steven knows it’s an evil question to ask a man smelling bacon in the aftermath of a guaro binge, but it’s either that or a frank _I told you so_ and Xabi looks like he might just murder him if he goes for the latter. He ignores Steven instead and walks in a jagged but determined line towards the well in the backyard, picks up the bucket and pours its entire icy-cold content onto his head. Steven tries not to chuckle but fails.   
  
“Still quiet?” Xabi asks when he gets back, sounding a bit more human this time.   
  
Steven’s frown at the mute walkie talkie is a clear answer.   
  
“Good. I have time to take a proper bath then.”  
  
Three hours later, hangover finally retreating to more humane levels, Xabi thinks scrubbing off dead spiders from the tub and carrying buckets of water under Gerrard’s unbearable smirk was worth every ounce of effort just to feel a clean tshirt on clean skin again. Sure, it’s a standard issue black military tshirt from the same unimaginative supply box and the camo pants give him painful flashbacks to the 90s, but Xabi’s pretty damn happy with life when he steps outside on the front porch.   
  
“Definitely not in Hackney anymore,” Steven quips, trying to look back to the handgun he’s cleaning.   
  
Xabi makes a face, but shoves his hands in his new pockets contentedly.   
  
“How come that gun gets special treatment?”   
  
“SIG Sauer P229R,” Steven almost murmurs, lovingly piecing the weapon back together like it’s second nature for his fingers. “Only the best pistol in the world.”  
  
“You sound like a beer ad.”  
  
“I know you were probably expecting something more… exciting. Some laser rays maybe, poison darts? Truth is there’s no need for any of that, I’ll take on anyone with just a 229.”  
  
Steven doesn’t even know why he’s asking him this, maybe because he sees Xabi’s a bit intrigued or maybe because it’s probably deeply frowned upon in Hackney, but…   
  
“You ever shot a gun?”  
  
“Not one made out of metal.”  
  
Even with toy guns, Xabi had always preferred to whack Mikel over the head rather than practice any marksmanship with them, but he leaves out that part.   
  
“It wouldn’t hurt to have extra firepower or in case something happens to me before we make contact.”  
  
It sounds innocuous enough and that’s how Xabi ends up seven yards from an empty bottle Steven places in the big tree as an improvised target.   
  
“We’ll start with shooting stance. Take a step forward with your right foot,” he creeps up behind Xabi’s back, surveying his every move. “You won’t need to flex your knees much, you’ll see what feels comfortable for you. The SIG is one of the most balanced handguns; it’s nice and smooth, goes exactly where you tell it to go.”  
  
“No wonder it’s your favorite.”   
  
Xabi earns himself a dirty look, but of the _well, shit… you got me_ variety.   
  
“You load the chamber by pulling back the slide and releasing it.” Each new set of instructions is demonstrated and Xabi follows closely, putting mental captions on every move of Steven’s hands. “The 229 shoots 12 rounds, we’ll go over reloading later. Make sure your thumb is folded under your middle finger and out of the way…”  
  
Xabi feels like he’s back in Petroleum Safety Fundamentals, a class that only sounds dull until it hits you with the full range of details. When he finally gets to cradle the gun in his own palm though, it’s all starting to fall into place. The handle feels cold but reassuringly solid.   
  
“It’s not delicate, it likes a firm grip,” Steven continues, “but you don’t need to give yourself finger camps. Let it fit comfortably in your hand, then tense your fingers again.”  
  
Xabi readjusts his grip accordingly.   
  
“Never keep your index finger anywhere near the trigger until you’re ready to shoot.”  
  
Xabi frowns. There are too many rules already.   
  
“Which one’s your dominant eye?”  
  
“My what?”  
  
“Point at the target closing one eye then the other. See which one’s better aligned with the sight.”  
  
“Bueno... I’m apparently a lefty.”  
  
The surprises keep coming, this time in the form of Steven’s palm spread flat between Xabi’s shoulder blades. The gentle pressure there spreads tenfold throughout the rest of his body.   
  
“Lean forward, bend your knees just a bit...”  
  
Xabi’s anything but comfortable, despite his stance being near perfect. Steven’s hand guiding his elbow at the correct angle isn’t helping though. Steven breathing next to him is not helping in fact.   
  
“Push the safety catch like I showed you…” _Click_. “When you’re ready, take aim and squeeze gently, don’t force it, just use your breathing. Take a breath, exhale half of breath, then squeeze the trigger. This is a .357 with a 3.8 inch barrel, so don’t be scared if it gets a little loud…”  
  
Steven hears Xabi taking a deep breath, but there’s no half exhalation, just a loud bang at which he doesn’t even flinch. Xabi looks startled then confused and finally pissed when he notices the bottle is clearly still intact.   
  
The tips of Steven’s fingers touch his elbow again.  
  
“You might want to…”  
  
“Shhh. You’re distracting me,” Xabi says and he’s being entirely truthful, even if just by omission.   
  
The clink of broken glass doesn’t come until the sixth shot and Xabi finally points the gun downward, his amber eyes made even warmer by the fresh wave of adrenaline.   
  
“Not bad,” Steven says genuinely. “Safety catch back on!”  
  
Xabi has other ideas.   
  
“I don’t really have a reason to even trust you are who you say you are, do I?” He raises the gun slowly, a bit surprised at the lack of tremor in his own arm. “Are you sure teaching me how to shoot a gun is the wisest decision?”  
  
Steven walks calmly towards the hot barrel of his SIG, gripping the safety catch in his fingers until the reverse _click_ is heard.   
  
“ _Never_ point a gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy,” he says with a half-smile, turning back towards the porch.   
  
Xabi doesn’t follow him inside the hacienda until the magazine is empty and all other six shots are breathed out.   
  
“You’re right, it _is_ very docile,” he says, pushing the SIG to Gerrard across the coffee table.   
  
“It could do with a less heavy slide that would still soak up the recoil so well.”  
  
Xabi stops chewing on the pineapple wedge he’d picked up on his way and watches Steven retrieve his pistol like a proud father.   
  
“Is that your ideal SIG Sauer?”  
  
“Maybe you could engineer something for it now that you’re a convert.”  
  
“I studied chemistry,” Xabi laughs, warm and throaty. “I don’t have a degree in how to be er… MacGyver. But I confess I didn’t expect to like shooting…”  
  
“I’m not surprised,” Steven says as he gets up to slide the SIG back into its holster. “You’re exactly the type who should never be allowed near a gun, no wonder you got a bit wild-eyed while you were holding it.”  
  
He’s suddenly very close to Xabi and doesn’t know how that happened.   
  
“It wasn’t the gun, _tonto_ ,” Xabi mutters. _OK, it was the gun. A little bit._ But it’s not the gun he’s grabbing now, but Steven’s face and oh… Xabi can be every bit as forceful as he remembers Steven being in these situations.   
  
Steven doesn’t react much initially, which is all Xabi needs to press his whole body into him until he finally needs to breathe again.   
  
“This is a terrible…” Steven pants. “Worst fucking idea… ever.”  
  
“Afraid of breaking any rules, Major Gerrard?”  
  
“Only common fucking sense,” Steven grunts, but protests aside, the only part of him that’s moving anywhere are his eyes and they’re not going very far, just downwards to Xabi’s wet lips. “You’re not just a civilian, but the worst kind of civilian. You’re thrill-seeking and reckless, a walking ticking bomb…”  
  
“Oh, _I_ ’m the ticking bomb?” Xabi objects. “In the five days since I’ve known you, you kidnapped me, shot me, stabbed me _and_ pushed me into a waterfall…”   
  
In an instance, their positions are flipped and Steven pushes him violently into the wall by the nearest lightless window, his hips making an eloquent point as they grind into Xabi until he makes an extremely undignified sound.   
  
_Yeah and look at you now._  
  
“Touché. You’re the one who started snogging me with people shooting at us though!”  
  
“That was a diversion,” Steven breathes against his neck, feeling Xabi’s pulse go wild.   
  
“Really? What’s this then?”  
  
“Confirmation.”   
  
Xabi’s tongue tastes of pineapple. _A really, really terrible, bad, no good… awfully delicious idea._  
  
“When I almost put a knife through your wrist,” Steven gasps, finally free of Xabi’s mouth, if not his hands which are resolutely planted anywhere he can find space under his shirt. “…you were scared out of your mind and _loving_ it. Your pupils dilated and your throat went dry, it was quite obvious you were half terrified, half aroused.”  
  
Xabi licks his lips quickly, just in case there was any doubt.   
  
“I’m zero percent terrified right now...”  
  
They ignore the crackling signals of the radio transmitter for a good minute, the sounds of sloppy, wet kissing, of teeth clashing and clasping flesh too tightly drowning out everything until an aggrieved voice finally breaks through.   
  
_“Come in, Ops 1. This is Alpha. Ops 1, do you read me?!?”_  
  
Xabi watches Steven slide to the walkie talkie reluctantly and has a genuine desire to point a gun at the fucking thing with extreme destructive intent.  
  
“Ops 1 confirming reception,” Steven says shakily, trying to steady his breath. “What the fuck took you so long, Lampard?”  
  
 _“Emperador is still in progress. You are to standby until Emperador targets are apprehended, we cannot be in the area, they are already on alert because of Alonso.”_  
  
“Frank, listen to me! You can’t…”  
  
Xabi’s not sure that chemistry would confirm the existence of plastic-melting frowns, but the scowl on Steven’s face would definitely be worth an experiment.   
  
_“I repeat, you are on standby, Gerrard! Standby until further notice. Acknowledge!”_  
  
Steven looks helplessly towards the ceiling for an instant, then lets his head loll back towards the transmitter.   
  
“Affirmative,” he says quietly.   
  
_“Alpha out.”_  
  
“No kidding, you fat fuck!” Steven hisses into the static void.   
  
“Can we go back to…,” Xabi starts, hopeful, but prepared for disappointment already due to the sheer speed with which Steven’s starting to dismantle the rifle waiting quietly by the window.  
  
“Start packing, take only the bare minimum. We’re about three and a half hours away from the nearest town.”  
  
Xabi doesn’t really need to see his face to know that a switch has flipped and the man in front of him is a completely different creature compared to the one whose hair he’d raked his fingers through two minutes ago.  
  
“Are we… going rogue?”


	7. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the fact is I had fun, fumbling around  
> All the advice I shunned, and I ran  
> Where they told me not to run, but I sure  
> Had fun, so  
> I'm gonna fuck it up again 
> 
> I've acquired quite a taste  
> For a well-made mistake  
> I wanna mistake why can't I make a mistake?

Walking, no talking turns out to be a policy Xabi can get behind one hundred percent because, theoretically, what he’s probably supposed to say is: _I’m sorry… about earlier…_ And then Steven’s most likely supposed to mumble something about forgetting all about it and bitch at him for not walking fast enough. Xabi can recognize social protocols in the abstract, it’s just when it comes to putting them into practice that… well… he’s not sorry, for one thing. At all.   
  
The change of scenery creeps up on him unnoticed, the trees are getting shorter and the air less humid. Civilization smacks them in the face in the form of a mostly empty road leading to a cluster of universally recognizable small town watering holes. A bodega neon flickers in the distant twilight promising adult entertainment and refreshments.   
  
Steven looks at Xabi for the first time in three hours, a tired sort of realization on his stubbly face.   
  
“We’re not exactly… conspicuous. You should probably lose the beard,” Steven concludes, a little mournfully.   
  
“No!” It doesn’t sound negotiable. “Is there a Plan B?”  
  
“We need transportation.”   
  
“What, you want to try to hitchhike?”  
  
“I was thinking more along the lines of stealing a ride.”  
  
“Oh.”  
  
Steven decides the neon-lit dive bar is the perfect establishment to target in order to put his quite literal plan in motion. They stalk a potential ride from behind a reeking alleyway and it’s not long before one presents itself in the form of a Ford pickup truck lazily parked the darkest corner of the alley across the bar. Steven motions for Xabi to move shortly after the Ford’s corpulent owner ambles into the bar for what is obviously not his first drink of the day. Xabi does his best to stand by the truck as casually as possible, hands shoved deep in his pockets, surveying the few patrons around the premise while Steven slides into the driver’s seat through the unlocked door.   
  
A few minutes later, Xabi goes a bit restless as his mental clock ticks in silence despite Steven focusing his best efforts on fumbling with broken wires under the dashboard.   
  
“This looks a lot easier in the movies,” Xabi says, jumping into the car once the engine finally spurs to life.   
  
There’s a miniature statue of the Virgin Mary staring at him with a deeply unimpressed expression from the dashboard and various rosaries and semi-pagan trinkets hanging from the mirror.  
  
“As do most things.”  
  
“So… what now?”  
  
“We need to steal a phone next,” Steven says, frowning at the blinking light behind the steering wheel. “Also… money for petrol. Mr. Responsible Driver doesn’t believe in keeping a full tank.”  
  
“I feel like an evil Robin Hood, stealing from the poor…,” Xabi muses, but his scruples sound terribly half-hearted.  
  
“You can personally park it back in its spot so the owner can drink and drive some more as soon as I get you to a safe house.”  
  
Xabi looks out the window, but all there is out there is darkness and trees and he’s had enough of both for a lifetime over the last few days. There are quite a few other subjects he’d like to bring up at the moment, but all he can think of asking is:  
  
“Do they teach you to steal cars in spy school?”  
  
“I was fully qualified by the time I got anywhere near MI6. I graduated from the school of life on the streets of Liverpool,” Steven answers, melancholia completely absent from his voice. He only takes his eyes off the road for a second, but the surprise on Xabi’s face requires some sort of elaboration.   
  
“I grew up in a part of town where your entry position in the professional world wasn’t at the local fish and chips shop if you had the sort of mates I had… By the time I was seventeen, I was quite high up the pecking order as an enforcer for one of the local bosses. I was too scrawny to beat money out of people, but I had other skills…”  
  
Xabi smiles quietly, trying to picture it.   
  
“Is there a feelgood story about how the army became your family and helped you see the light?”  
  
“Not quite. I was just a beaut of a thug who got caught at the right time, before I could break someone’s limbs beyond repair. Judge McAllister was a retired Royal Marine and he made me an offer I wasn’t stupid enough to refuse.”  
  
A gust of warmth lingers around the corners of Steven’s eyes, soon to be erased by high beams from incoming traffic.   
  
“The most criminal thing I did by that age was using grandma’s eggs to throw at cars passing under the highway bridge,” Xabi says and he starts to mess with the car radio in search for an appropriate soundtrack. “I mean… I smoked weed in a summer camp once, but it was in the Netherlands so it probably doesn’t count.”  
  
“On the other hand, you just stole a car in a foreign country and you’re about to steal a wallet,” Steven consoles him, his thumb drumming a silent baseline into the steering wheel accompanying the low female voice Xabi had selected from the three radio stations available. “You’re catching up.”   
  
They pull over in front of what looks like a particularly seedy dive bar frequented by truck drivers and Xabi is once more charged with keeping watch over Steven’s felonies through a thick curtain of smoke mixed with way too loud bastardized currulao songs vomited by the jukebox in the corner. It’s Happy Hour judging by the crowd and not too many clients are more preoccupied with the two men entering the mix than they are with the free-flowing booze.  
One of the bleary-eyed men engaged in a heated game of pool will eventually miss the leather jacket Steven swipes off a chair on his way to the bar, but by then it will be far too late.   
  
As instructed, Xabi exits the locale a couple of minutes after he sees Steven heading out with his hands in his pockets and walks around the building to where they’d spotted a pay phone hanging off the wall of a nearby abandoned disco. Judging by the way Steven is repeatedly punching in numbers into the metal frame with no visible result, the small roadside town has fully embraced the smartphone era and never looked back.   
  
“Out of coins?” Xabi asks, handing Steven a shiny Blackberry when he’s close enough to make sure nobody can see their illicit exchange in the faint light of the street lamp. “I’m catching up,” he adds, not without a certain amount of childish pride. “You’re turning me into a criminal mastermind.”  
  
Steven looks from Xabi’s face to the cell phone and back again.  
  
“I can see how conflicted you are…”   
  
His mind is on everything at once and Xabi’s giddiness is somewhere towards the bottom of his list. And yet, for a couple of long seconds on their way back to the car, Steven can’t stop wanting to look at him and figure out from beyond the shadows that surround them why the last text in the Sent folder is not a distress call to some London number but a semi-illiterate tirade against an ex-wife named Claribel (as far as Steven can decipher from the drunken textspeak left behind by the former owner of the Blackberry).   
  
“Hey, Meatwall, it’s me,” Steven says cautiously once they’re back inside the pickup truck. “I’m in the neighborhood with a friend, mind if we stop by?”  
  
Xabi can’t really decipher much of the ensuing brief conversation, but once they’re back on the road Steven saves him the trouble of yet another unanswered question. He’s texting and driving with the dexterity that would make any valley girl proud.   
  
“Are you checking your email?” Xabi asks, mostly to piss him off. Pissing Steven off is entertaining, he has to admit it, but there’s more to it than that for a change. “Can I check mine when you’re done?”  
  
The driver’s window is cracked open three seconds later and out the Blackberry goes, disintegrating on the tarmac behind them.   
  
“I left a breadcrumb for Lampard, it’s not a good idea to hang on to that number on an unsecured line,” Steven answers tersely.   
  
“Is he your boss?”  
  
The sound Steven makes amuses Xabi to no end.  
  
“Fat Frank and I… collaborate occasionally, but we work on different teams... I report to him on this particular mission,” he eventually admits, resigned.   
  
“Fat Frank...?”  
  
Steven is so very tempted to put yet another chink in Xabi’s hollywoodized mental image of his job, but in the end truth prevails.   
  
“He’s a good lad,” he chuckles. “Dependable. But he liked his mince pies a bit too much back in his days of flying with the boys in blue and the name just… stuck.”   
  
“I wonder what _he_ calls you…”  
  
Xabi doesn’t feel too secure in the knowledge that apparently Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service is one big high school.   
  
“Open the glove box. Can you see anything you could write with?”  
  
What Xabi finds is mostly trash, but eventually he fishes a chewed-up pen and a crumpled phone bill from a pile of empty M&M packets and crushed cans of energizer drinks.   
  
“Write down this number and don’t lose it in case I…”  
  
“In case of what?”  
  
“Just write it down: 05 664 0968. Pepe Reina. Call from a public phone if you must, don’t use cells. You’re now a thieving pro, I’m sure you’ll find coins no problem.”  
  
“Friend of yours?”  
  
“Paid to be a friend of yours actually. He’s the General Consul of the Kingdom of Spain in Cartagena. Big, loud, bald guy… has more children than he can keep track of and they’re all at his vacation house up the coast. You can trust him with your life; we’ve known each other… through work. That was before a bullet in a kneecap sent him into civilian machinations in your Majesty’s embassies.”  
  
“Is he a… Spanish spy then?”  
  
Xabi arches an eyebrow, finding the very idea extremely odd. Spies still seem like celluloid creations to him, even though he’s had his hands all over the one sitting next to him and knows too well that he’s undeniably and deliciously real.   
  
“They’re not called spies in the diplomatic corps. They’re… cultural envoys of your nation.”  
  
Xabi throws his back against the headrest, closes his eyes and laughs at the absurd turn of his existence.   
  
~  
  
They can’t see the ocean through the thick darkness, but Xabi can hear it lapping at cliffs near the gated beach villa they arrive at shortly after sunset the next day. There are armed guards waving them through the check-point stationed in front of the wrought-iron gates and security cameras craning their wiry necks at them as soon as they step onto the porch, but nothing feels quite as unsettling to Xabi as the loud shriek that pierces his ears moments after a moon-faced maid opens the front door.   
  
“Uncle Eshteben!”  
  
There’s a torrent whirling through the hallway and it doesn’t stop until it clutches at Steven’s legs and shrieks some more when he picks the little girl up and lifts her high above his head.   
  
“Is this my Gracie?!? It can’t be!” Steven’s eyes go wide and he beams at the blonde head floating above his face. “Who is this giant girl, huh? And what have you done to my stumpy?”  
  
Xabi looks on in alarm as another blonde head peers from behind the legs of their host, but at least this one is quiet.   
  
“Get over here, you Scouse hijo de puta!”  
  
Pepe Reina is immense, bald, loud and he truly does have a lot of children, two of which are permanently attached to various parts of Steven from the moment they step into the plush vacation home. He’s holding a sleeping baby when he’s introduced to Xabi, beaming his million watt smile at them and promising a paella feast for dinner that even snobbish Basques would not dare to turn down.   
  
His wife, a bright-eyed, statuesque brunette introduces herself as Yolanda. She sets yet another blonde toddler into a high chair before she gives Steven a half-hug made almost impossible by the rigid grip her oldest daughter has on the man’s neck.  
  
“Another one?” Steven asks Yolanda indignantly. “Christ, I can’t understand how you even let this ugly bastard anywhere near you.”  
  
Xabi’s a bit relieved to realize he’s apparently not expected to show much interest in or excitement about children since at least fifty percent of them are completely fascinated by Steven anyway.   
  
“Scousers,” Yolanda quips, _“nobody else understands them so they have to make sure they stick together.”_  
  
 _“That one was born in Liverpool during my NATO deployment, that one too…,”_ Pepe points to his daughters, who are simultaneously cooing their excitement to Steven and trying to show him something in a picture book as he sits in between them on the couch. _“This one,”_ he nods towards the dozing baby in his arms, _“is 100%_ _madrileño_ _. That one… I don’t remember.”_  
  
 _“Italia!”_ Yolanda yells out from the dining room where she’s setting the table.   
  
Throughout dinner, Xabi answers polite questions in a mixture of Spanish and English for Steven’s benefit, talks about his work and his life in the Basque Country - it hasn’t been home in a way in a very long time, but of course it always will be and after the second bottle of wine Pepe is in a distinctly patriotic mood, doubled by a welcome gossipy streak responsible for revealing at least one embarrassing story about Major Gerrard’s misadventures in karaoke bars.  
  
The subject of Xabi’s encounter with Steven or their eventual destination is carefully avoided by both sides, so it’s overall a warm, friendly affair with good food and excellent wine, two things Xabi’s missed dearly. He finds it somewhat disappointing that he doesn’t have to come up with any elaborate cover story about his background or his and Steven’s plans for the immediate future, but Xabi’s slowly coming to terms with the fact that the missions of secret agents are often quite mundane and involve hours spent either walking in silence or dozing off on long car rides. Well, there are occasional gunshot wounds and pushing innocent engineers into waterfalls…  
  
 _“I’m not even going to ask how you got caught up in this with Gerrard, don’t want to know.”_  
  
Pepe hands Xabi another plate to dry.   
  
_That switch again_ , Xabi thinks, almost startled by how fast the tipsy, gentle giant who talks a mile an hour at the dinner table morphs into this steely, completely lucid man with whom he’s on cleaning duty in the kitchen while Yolanda puts the toddler population to bed. Steven’s been deployed to read the book about an adventurous, globetrotting bunny to the girls for the third time since dessert and Pepe and Xabi have a clear view from the kitchen to the faces he makes as he turns the pages, a girl curled into a ball under each arm between his torso and the couch.  
  
 _“I’m probably not allowed to tell you or he’ll kill me,”_ Xabi smiles. _“Or I’d have to kill you, I’m not sure which applies. I’m not really used to this… parallel universe you people live in. I don’t know how you manage such a normal life.”_  
  
 _“By practically retiring from active duty. What I do now is also… important, but in a different way. And I get to come home to my family every night, so it works out well. Not all of us are cut out for it though…”_  
  
Pepe follows Xabi’s eyes towards the living room where Gracie (whom Steven refuses to call Grecia because, as he’d told Pepe many times, naming your child after the geographical location where they were conceived is a dick move) squirms and dissolves into a fit of giggles when Steven tickles her side.   
  
_“He’s really good at what he does,”_ he continues, rinsing the last of the wine glasses. _“Too good.”_  
  
It’s quite obvious Pepe doesn’t mean bedtime stories, although it’s hard to imagine that a man who’s so at ease with miniature people who usually make Xabi feel completely clueless is not cut out for a normal life.   
  
_“Don’t know how much you know about him,”_ Pepe says, politely trying to avoid the question.  
  
 _“He doesn’t talk much.”_  
  
 _“Need to get quite a few drinks in him first.”_  
  
 _“Was he always like this?”_ It’s Xabi’s turn to fail at casual disinterest.  
  
 _“As Scouse as it gets for as long as I’ve known him,”_ Pepe says with a wry grin, _“but Afghanistan…”_ His smile fades and he waits for Xabi to finish drying off a long-stemmed glass. _“Snipers work with partners; his was his best mate from the academy. An even crankier, loud hijo de puta from Liverpool named Carragher. They were captured together… held for weeks…”_  
  
There’s no need for Pepe to go into any details because Xabi knows _held_ is a convenient euphemism for what he’s seen on Steven’s back.  
  
 _“Only one of them came back and he was half-dead when they found him. I don’t think Steven’s ever talked to anybody about and well… I don’t like to stick my nose where it doesn’t belong, but word is he joined MI6 to finish the other half of the job and they’re more than happy to use him for these kinds of missions.”_  
  
 _“He seems quite… composed to me,”_ Xabi says, trying not to sound too hopeful.  
  
 _“Hombre, I can only hope the rumors aren’t true, I love that fucker. But I know after what he’s been through, he would have never been on active duty again in NATO intelligence. The MI6 directorate is a different kind of animal,”_ Pepe frowns in the manner of a man who’d prefer to not go into details.  
  
~  
  
“You’re going to have to sleep eventually,” Xabi’s voice punctures the silence hanging over the balcony of Pepe’s guest bedroom. “There are armed guards downstairs…”  
  
“I’m good for now,” Steven insists, bent over the stone railing, supporting himself on his elbows and scanning the darkness around the villa. His voice is rusty and dry and he’s turned away from Xabi so that less than half of his clean-shaven face is visible.  
  
Xabi joins him, his bare toes curling on the cold slab of granite, although without his glasses the sea might as well not exist somewhere near the horizon he sees blurred in the distance.  
  
“Are we still in danger?” I don’t mean in the philosophical way… Do you think Pérez’s men would find us here?”  
  
“We gave them no reason to, but… I don’t know.”   
  
Xabi can see the ever present tension in Steven’s shoulders straining in a coil at the back of his neck.   
  
“I’d hate to think I’m putting Pepe’s family in danger, all because of a stupid…”  
  
“Pepe wouldn’t have us here if he didn’t think it was a reasonable risk to take for a few hours, Xabi. We’ll be on our way to Cartagena in the morning; once I get you on Spanish soil at the Consulate, you’ll be somebody else’s problem,” Steven says, thinking vaguely that Xabi’s face looks weird right now and he doesn’t seem to be interested in taking the banter bait.  
  
“I’m driving tomorrow then. Try to go to sleep, you’ll need all the energy you can get to get away from those little girls, they’re like a terrifying human tornado.”  
  
“It’s the Reina DNA,” Steven smiles with wry fondness.  
  
Xabi waits for a couple of moments, lets the silent plea hang in there for just long enough to make him feel awkward and stupid and seventeen, then heads towards the sliding door, throwing the words over his shoulder in a soft, almost apologetic tone:  
  
“I promise to wake you up if the dreams come back.”  
  
He’s already out of the small balcony, but he hears it nonetheless:  
  
“They’re not dreams. They’re memories.”  
  
~  
  
Xabi’s face is still buried in his pillow when he feels a hand on his shoulder followed by a palm clamping his mouth shut when he tries to scream.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I think this place is full of spies  
> I think they're onto me

Pepe’s bald head is blocking the first light of dawn creeping through the curtains. Xabi’s eyes stare up at him in terror as he’s frantically trying to think of any clue he’s missed during dinner or whether kicking against a guy whose nickname is apparently Meatwall makes any sense. The hand pressing against Xabi’s mouth releases some of the pressure but still lingers while Pepe’s free index finger goes up to his own lips. Later, when Xabi has time to process life beyond the clouds of survival mode panic fogging up his brain, he’ll feel slightly ashamed of his burst of paranoia, but in his immediate circumstances there’s only one thing he can think of:  
  
“ _Where’s Steven?_ ” he croaks against Pepe’s palm.  
  
“ _Downstairs_.” Pepe’s head snaps towards the window as a round of gunshots echoes through the stillness of the house. “ _That would be him. We need to go_.”  
  
 _How original_ , Xabi thinks, well and truly sick of the line by now. He gets about twenty seconds to shove himself halfway into his jeans and shoes before the bedroom window explodes behind them. He can feel shards caught in his hair as they run down the staircase three steps at a time.  
  
The Reina holiday home living room is bathed in semi-darkness and bullets flying both through and out of the window, the latter courtesy of Steven’s sniper rifle and Yolanda’s handgun.  
  
“ _Office romance_ ,” Pepe manages to smile proudly and it’s fucking dazzling even under the circumstances, which see him dragging Xabi into hiding behind the sofa.  
  
“ _Your children_ …”  
  
“ _They’re playing hide and seek in the basement bunker. Your turn to hide now_ ,” Pepe says, ducking back behind their improvised fort after a quick scan of the battlefield.  
  
“ _No reason to hide_ ,” Xabi frowns, thoroughly offended. “ _I can shoot a gun_.”  
  
Pepe gives him a somewhat skeptical look, but since Steven is too busy pointing the rifle at a newly acquired  
target, he does not wait for any confirmation.  
  
“ _Amor_ …” Pepe calls out.  
  
Yolanda lowers herself smoothly on one bended leg and drops a pistol to the ground, pushing it towards Pepe’s hideout with her bare foot. The only thing Xabi gets to do to it is release the safety catch before everything goes loud and smoky. When he opens his eyes next, the gun is long gone and he’s trapped under all 6' 2" of Pepe Reina who’s maternally holding Xabi’s head pressed against the carpet.  
  
“ _Hostia puta_ ,” coughs Pepe, his throat stinging from the grenade smoke. “ _Yolanda!_ ”  
  
Xabi shakes him off, trying to make his way towards the gaping hole in what used to be the terrace. It feels like  
every drop of his blood is boiling and rushing madly in and out of his heart chambers, leaving him with no time to catch up and breathe.  
  
“ _We’re fine_ ,” Yolanda shouts from somewhere beyond the mist before something else explodes, this time outside the blown up window.  
  
Xabi feels a hand on his shoulder and turns to see a dusty but otherwise alive Steven lifting his eyes towards the palm tree-lined garden outside while pulling Xabi away to flatten him against the nearest intact wall. That’s when Xabi hears it again, the muffled whistling of propellers swishing ever nearer. It’s followed by relentless artillery that’s not directed at them for a change. Then everything goes back to immutable stillness and Xabi can actually hear the Pacific waves swirling against the rocks outside.  
  
~

“ _I’m really sorry about all of this_ ,” Xabi says to Yolanda as one of the girls pulls a charred thread of the former curtain from her hair.  
  
“ _Don’t be, the little one slept through it all downstairs_ ” she says with a comforting smile, running a soothing palm over her daughter’s back. “ _Retirement has never been this much fun. Back to diapers now_ ,” she winks and moves to shepherd her brood towards the undamaged portion of the holiday home.  
  
Xabi and Pepe survey the destruction outside through the wide open front door and find it to be considerably more extensive than the mess inside.  
  
“ _Should have warned me we were having a fucking English barbecue, I would have bought beer_ ,” Pepe mutters as he steps over the threshold.  
  
A black helicopter is plopped placidly on the lawn and Pepe heads towards the uniformed men conversing with Steven next to it, military vehicles smoldering among dying flames in the background. Two young men in black combat gear are inspecting the dead bodies littering the rose bushes in the garden.  
  
Pepe gives a crooked military salute to the man in charge and goes to make animated small talk with the helicopter pilot, a spiky-haired blonde who grins from ear to ear when he sees him. Steven takes a small electronic device from the team leader and nods briskly to the man who Xabi presumes to be Fat Frank, even though he looks fit as a fiddle. He walks towards Xabi with a blank expression he tries to pull together into a half-smile when he reaches him.  
  
“That’s your ride home sorted.”  
  
“What about you?... You’re not coming with us?”  
  
“Got some unfinished business.”  
  
“Are you going after Pérez?” Xabi asks without expecting an answer either way. “I can come with you.”  
  
“No, you can’t,” Steven almost startles, a vague note of panic in his voice. “You’re not my mission anymore,” he says, quieter, but the lightness he’s going for fails to reach his eyes.  
  
“I can help! Your cover is blown, but I didn’t have one to begin with. I could get you inside, I can tell them…”  
  
“The only place you’re going is on that helicopter,” Steven creases his forehead like he can’t even believe he’s having this conversation, can’t believe how reasonable Xabi’s attempting to sound. “Fat Frank will take good care of you.”  
  
“But you…”  
  
“I’m not only paid to do this, I’m also trained to not give anything away when things go wrong, both of which do not apply to civilians. Especially not the last one.”  
  
Xabi looks over at the agents boarding the helicopter, completely out of arguments and visibly pissed off about it.  
  
“Don’t look so disappointed, you divvy… It just means you’re still human.”  
  
Somewhere over Steven’s shoulder the last of the agents hops on the helicopter and its blades start their slow whirling motion.  
  
“I’m not… arrested… I didn’t do anything wrong, _sí_? It’s not like your government can even tell me where to go.”  
  
“I need you to _listen_ to me, Xabi,” Steven takes the half of a step forward that brings them so close the tips of their noses are almost touching. Xabi can practically feel the ominous tension behind Steven’s every word just like he can feel his breath on his temple. “Her Majesty is not a charity organization… You’re going to be a very valuable commodity when you land in London, you need to use that to keep yourself alive. As soon as you get out of the debriefing, you need to pack a bag and never look back. Don’t go to Spain for a while and don’t tell a single soul, not even your brother, where you’re going! Just keep a low profile in the most low-key shithole you can find.”  
  
Steven’s voice is like sandpaper, his heavy whisper barely rising over the ever louder swirl of the accelerating propeller and he throws one wary gaze towards Lampard, who looks like he desperately wishes he had a horn to honk.  
  
“I’m not doing this for nothing, Alonso! You’re under no obligation to tell them a fucking thing. They’ll protect you as long as they think you may be valuable to them, but you’re on your own, do you realize that? You can trust Lampard with your life until you get to Vauxhall Cross. Once you’re inside, ask to speak to nobody but the SIS Chief. Her name is Dame Hope Powell. Nobody else, you hear me?”  
  
“Hope Powell,” Xabi nods like he’s back in class breaking Euskera into syllables, his memory struggling with the vague familiarity of the name.  
  
“She’s my M…,” Steven says reluctantly, but with a twinkle of mirth in the corner of his eyes because he can feel Xabi’s _I knew it_ smile before it even starts to form. It flitters just as quickly off his lips though.  
  
“They won’t come back for you if you get caught, will they?”  
  
“Don’t do anything stupid, Xabi,” Steven pleads and the sound hangs limply off his vocal chords, like an oversized sweater he doesn’t wear much. His hand goes up between them, hesitant and awkward, and in the end his thumb stops just a millimeter short of running over the corner of Xabi’s mouth because it would be cheap and manipulative and that’s the farthest thing from what he feels like being right now. “Please…”  
  
Xabi nods quickly, looking everywhere but at Steven’s eyes and by the time he lifts his head, all he can see is Steven’s retreating back.  
  
“I’ll see you in London,” he says, too proud to make it an interrogative.  
  
The quick look back Steven gives him says it all.  
  
 _No, you won’t._  
  
~  
  
The coast is now slowly retreating from his view. Xabi stares out of the small helicopter window seemingly oblivious to the animated chatter between the two young lieutenants who’d proudly welcomed him on board while Lampard gave the pilot his take off orders from the front seat. He can still see the road he’d arrived on only a day before winding on the ever more distant ground beneath them, but it too will soon be out of shot. When he casts a furtive glance to the young man sitting next to him on the bench, Xabi’s decision is already made.  
  
Corporal Kelly is still bragging to his buddy seated across from them about the amount of arse he’d kicked at Starcraft the other night when his standard issue SIG Sauer comes out flying from his holster and its barrel is pressed coldly against his temple as Xabi’s arm wraps itself around his neck.  
  
“Sir…” Sargent Sturridge calls out coolly while keeping Xabi under unflappable observation and in the sight of his own brandished weapon.  
  
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Lampard yells from the cockpit, tugging his earmuffs off.  
  
“Tell the pilot to land, I’m going back!”  
  
“Mr. Alonso, I know you went through a rough time lately,” Lampard’s voice is struggling to shake off the mix of astonishment and anger to make way for detached professionalism, “Please put the gun down, you have no idea what you’re…”  
  
“This is a SIG Sauer 229R… the .357 caliber…” Xabi pauses just long enough to quickly eye the side of the weapon for confirmation, “… has a 3.8 inch barrel, shoots 12 rounds… it’s the smoothest, most well-balanced handgun in the world and it’s going straight through the brain of Corporal Kelly if you don’t put me back on the ground. NOW!”  
  
Xabi can’t see the murderous look in Commander Lampard’s eyes, but it’s a pretty good bet it’s not much different to the one Sargent Sturridge is currently flashing at him.  
  
“I can blow his kneecap off faster than he can react, Sir,” Sturridge offers calmly.  
  
His composure is only momentarily shattered by the loud gunshot ringing through their enclosed space. It’s enough to make Lampard infuriated once the pilot stabilizes the now perforated aircraft.  Xabi turns the SIG back onto the ashen-faced Corporal Kelly.  
  
“All I’m asking is to be left alone. Put me down!”  
  
“You’re risking the life of people who’ve saved yours for some ridiculous Stockholm Syndrome?!?” Lampard sounds done with any attempt at diplomacy. “Who the hell do you think you are?”  
  
“I’m a civilian. You can’t order me around. I’m getting sick of having to ask for the same thing over and over again. Let me go, now!”  
  
Xabi’s never been more serene in his whole life. He’s not even relieved or satisfied or otherwise affected when, after a brief deliberation, he hears Commander Lampard’s order to the pilot:  
  
“Lower us down, Hart.”  
  
“Sir…?”  
  
“Nice and low so he can jump if he so wishes, we’re not doing another take-off for him,” Lampard clarifies emphatically.  
  
“Yes, Sir!”  
  
“Sturridge,” he adds, craning his neck towards the back, “drop your supply pack after him and some live rounds.”  
  
“Yes, Sir.”  
  
The young man follows the order methodically and tosses in an extra Glock 9mm in the care package he puts together with haste. When he speaks to Xabi again it’s not without a certain amount of grudging admiration.  
  
“It’ll take more than a SIG Sauer...”  
  
“Sometimes it’s all you need,” Xabi replies, his eyes trained on the now fast-approaching jungle floor.  
  
He hits the ground rolling and takes no time to gaze at the departing helicopter before he sets out to find the road again.


	9. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Quote Captain Badass:  
> "I am setting your heart on fire  
> So when you leave me  
> I will burn on in your soul"

“Good morning, welcome to Chamartín.”  
  
“Good morning. My name is Xabier Alonso. I’m here to see Mr. Képler Ferreira. I’m afraid I don’t have an appointment, but… he will want to see me, I can assure you.”  
  
The last bit is addressed more to the security camera peering discreetly over the reception from the entrance rather than to the almond-eyed pretty young lady behind the desk on whose face Xabi can read the signs of an impending struggle.   
  
“Mr. Ferreira is in a meeting at the moment.”  
  
 _I know._  
  
This is Xabi’s cue to unleash the charm offensive full on, his most self-possessed half smile deployed already to full effect and well… Xabi’s not one to get big-headed or anything, but he’s frankly impressed with how easily he’s already demolishing any defensive ramparts standing in his way.   
  
“Would you mind getting him?... ¿ _Por favor_?”   
  
And that’s that. About ten percent of the mission is accomplished once the young lady does his bidding. Xabi flexes his fingers slowly, as if testing his body for any signs of betrayal and when he’s pleased with the result, he slides an arm across the now vacated reception desk and grabs the guest access card.   
  
One… two… three… four flights of stairs taken to avoid any elevator encounters and the last level leads into a seemingly abandoned section of the building’s underground parking lot. Xabi knows better than that. He slides gingerly along the wall until he can finally see anonymous Door X guarded by two uniformed young men shaped like 19th century armoires. He can feel a drop of sweat pooling at his temple in the stale air. It’s not rationally possible to think that he’s been waiting for more than five minutes, but Xabi feels he’s aged at least a couple of years by the time he sees the door open and a bald, swarthy man (“ _ugly as fuck and twice as mean, looks like a rabid pug_ ” – Pepe’s profiling turns out to be unsurprisingly inspired) emerging to bark some instructions at the guards. He looks pissed.   
  
The squarer of the two armoires follows Ferreira through the exit leading to the elevator and that’s when Xabi’s curls his fingers around the SIG holstered near the small of his back. His hands feel icy cold but steadier than ever when he screws in the silencer into the tip of the barrel (“ _like a badass champagne cork_ ” er… fine, Pepe, whatever), but Xabi’s not even surprised when his first tranquilizer shot (“ _Joder, because it’s a terrible idea to give a civilian live ammunition_ , _do you even have to ask…?_ ”) doesn’t come anywhere close to grazing the guard’s neck. He has about half a second to make a decision. Or rather the adrenaline spiking in Xabi’s blood takes no more than half a second to make him step out from the shadows, take advantage of the target’s confusion and shoot him wherever the hell he can aim. It turns out to be the guy’s hip, which does nothing to put him to sleep immediately, but the sting is strong and surprising enough to give Xabi time to whack him hard over the head with the butt of the gun. The third shot is much closer to his aorta and the guard is out cold before Xabi even bends over his limp body to pocket his access card.   
  
  
They’re in a bunker and one of them is tied to a chair under the sickly glow of a lamp, but that’s where the flashback ends. For one thing, Xabi is wearing a two thousand pound gray suit and matching tie and smells divine while Steven is wearing the same type of paramilitary gear he had when they first… well… second met except with lots more blood splashed over it in fresh stains.   
  
There’s a bluish bruise starting to trickle across the side of Steven’s forehead right next to where drops of blood are slowly accumulating over his left eyebrow, threatening to spill over.   
  
“What the _fuck_ …”  
  
“No time for that now, we have to…” Xabi starts then stops just short of mouthing the ultimate movie cliché. He’d laugh if he weren’t busy kneeling next to Steven’s bound wrists.   
  
“What part of _don’t do anything stupid_ did you fail to grasp?” Steven croaks, his breath coming out in dazed little rasps as he tastes metal and salt on his split lip.   
  
“I know what you’re trying to do, Pepe told me,” Xabi huffs out, frustrated by the sturdiness of the deceptively flimsy strips around Steven’s wrists. “Did you really think I was going to let you carry on with this suicide in the line of duty bullshit?... Before I even got to have sex with you?”  
  
The plastic finally snaps.   
  
“You do know how to sweep a man off his feet, Alonso. Hard to believe you’re single.”  
  
Steven wipes the blood off his battered hairline with his left hand, his right arm hanging heavy and rigid as he pulls himself up from his confines.   
  
“Chamartín’s… IT department didn’t take too kindly to my wiping out their servers of anything you ever produced for them,” Steven says flatly like having his elbow completely twisted out of its socket and well on its way to becoming grotesquely swollen is a standard operating procedure.   
  
The one thing he seems to care about though is the SIG Sauer Xabi extends towards his good arm. He could swear Steven’s eyes just literally lit up.   
  
“Can you walk?”  
  
“I have to, don’t I?”  
  
  
They fish out the decommissioned guard’s weapon on their way out.   
  
“I don’t suppose you have a Plan B,” Steven asks for the sake of conversation once the bullets start flying from the direction of the fire exit.   
  
“Err… Pepe wasn’t very clear on that,” Xabi whispers breathlessly. They flatten themselves against the nearest corner for cover. “Plan A was to find you where Pepe thought they may be keeping you. He said you’d know how to get out of here if you were still alive.”  
  
“Right...”  
  
Xabi sees it when they run towards the backdoor emergency exit. It’s a thin but persistent strip of blood searing through the dullness of the concrete, but there’s no time (ha!) to contemplate it just now, there’s only the elevator and the sounds of their pursuers getting ever nearer.   
  
The elevator doors open with a literal bang, the paneled mirror of the back wall exploding into a shower of sparkly reflections. However, the next bullet doesn’t have enough time to hit the glass cage again before the doors whoosh shut, elegant and impassive. Less than thirty seconds later, Steven shoots the elevator’s control panel just as their heads become visible through two sets of transparent walls. It comes to an abrupt stop halfway between a lobby and a glass-walled conference room.   
  
“What…”  
  
“Time to get off. They think we’re heading for the main exit. Conference room’s less crowded,” Steven answers with cool detachment, like they’re picking curtains or a new sofa.  
  
If this were the movies, Xabi thinks, they’d shoot through two thick walls of polycarbonate and laminated glass and shatter them with one magic bullet. It’s long ago sunk in that reality is far more mundane so the emergency mechanism of the elevator cracks the doors open between floors and they crawl towards the upper level, Xabi dragging Steven up by his good arm.  
  
“Try to act terrified,” Steven prompts, his SIG making contact with Xabi’s temple.   
  
A woman screams when they step out of the conference room towards the fire exit. The sight of the well-dressed gentleman with his hands in the air shoved from behind by a bloodied and beaten scowling man is enough of a show-stopper to buy them crucial seconds to reach the stairs.   
  
“That was riveting,” Xabi smirks. “Where the fuck are we going?”  
  
He realizes keeping up with Steven skipping three steps up in one leap has become worryingly easy, but it’s only when they barge through the door at the top of the stairs and into the blinding sunshine that Xabi sees just how ashen Steven’s face is and how soaked in blood his entire left side below his shoulder is.   
  
The sight of the helipad and their prospective ride to anywhere but here and now distracts Xabi from the cold fright wrapping itself around his throat.   
  
“Probably a good time to mention I didn’t do all that great on my navigation tests in basic training,” Steven’s breath is now a torrent, his lungs audibly struggling to catch up with his erratic pulse.   
  
“I put a bullet hole in the last helicopter I was on,” Xabi yells as they hop onto the slender Robinson R44 Raven II.  
“My standards are pretty low.”  
  
There are no holes in this aircraft, though not for the lack of trying. They are simply out of range already when the now overstaffed but ineffective security forces burst onto the helipad and can do nothing more but squint into the heatwave undulating the sunlight around the Raven.   
  
  
Cartagena is soon spread like a glittering maze beneath them, high rise buildings getting progressively smaller. The cruise ships stretching their whale backs in the docks are a good reminder to Xabi that he needs a vacation. A real vacation on some sea shore with no dead liquid dinosaurs to be unearthed. No laptop, no lab reports, just a trashy Harlan Cobben mystery he’d pick up at the airport, an endless supply of gin and tonic and ideally…   
  
“Did you really shoot up Lampard’s bird?”  
  
“Threatened to kill one of his men while I was at it,” Xabi tries to not sound exceedingly smug about it because that part had not exactly been his favorite.   
  
Steven doesn’t seem entirely broken up about it, although Xabi can’t tell if it’s because Lampard’s men are not his men or because he’s pouring every ounce of energy into keeping his eyes open and his hands from trembling on the controls of the helicopter.   
  
“Why?”  
  
“Why what?”  
  
“Aside from the fact that you’re most likely certifiable and out to ruin my life, I mean. Why… why would you do that?”  
  
“Well… you’re not very good at this secret agent business,” Xabi says all sensible and don’t-take-it-personally, “which I guess makes us both a bit… let’s face it, we’re both fuck ups.”  
  
Steven doesn’t really have time for hurt pride before Xabi gives him a loaded look, his eyes shimmering like sparkling wine.  
  
“It didn’t work, Steven. My great discovery… it was never going to work.”  
  
“Chamartín’s Head of Security didn’t seem to think so when he was breaking my elbow looking for the data I stole off their computers,” Steven grumbles, a creeping suspicion starting to form in his head nonetheless.   
  
“They had the theoretical models, yes. But no matter how perfect the chemistry was, I just… couldn’t find the right formula. And believe me, I tried. That’s why I went along with the change of venue, I guess I thought maybe the Colombian refinery would do the trick. I was just buying time….”   
  
He swallows a bitter taste in his mouth, a reflux of failure mixed with guilt.   
  
“It may never work or take longer than one man’s lifespan to see it happen.”  
  
“Oh.”  
  
Steven feels like he’s reached the limit of his eloquence.   
  
“I couldn’t just fly off knowing you could die for nothing. Or… you know… at all…”  
  
Steven pretends really hard to be focusing on nothing but their gentle descent into what looks like a leafy residential neighborhood. Once they’re close enough, Xabi sees the Union Jack flapping in their propeller draft and half a battalion of Royal Marines descending on the manicured lawn of the consulate of the United Kingdom, a country they are technically about to invade.   
  
~  
  
“Agent Gerrard needs to rest. He’s in no condition…”  
  
It’s not like Xabi can’t tell already. The oxygen mask on his wan face as Steven is wheeled into the Consulate on a stretcher was one of his first clues, right after he’d collapsed three steps into their march towards hours of bureaucratic wankery. He barges into the infirmary after the medic regardless.   
  
“I just want to…”  
  
“Mr. Alonso, you need to leave. Now!”  
  
Steven wraps his hand weakly around the medic’s labcoat and the shrillness level of her voice drops significantly when he rasps something at her from beneath his oxygen mask.   
  
“Two minutes,” she concedes, shooting Xabi a dirty look on her way out.   
  
Xabi has no idea what Steven’s trying to do so he helps him claw the mask off his face while Steven protects his crushed arm during his attempt to drag himself to a half-seating position on his side.  
  
“Steven, you have a bullet in you. Again… It’s probably best if you don’t try any heroics, that was just failed banter earlier, I don’t actually believe you’re…”  
  
“Shut up! The bandage…”  
  
“What…?”  
  
“Bandage… on my back… take it off!”  
  
Xabi feels a wave of dismay hit him when he notices how laborious the rise and fall of Steven’s chest is. The pit of his stomach feels too tight.   
  
He lifts up Steven’s shirt gingerly, his fingertips startled by how heated his skin is, and rips the dirty bandage off. The wound that had once been healing nicely is now an angry red scar again, oozing a too sticky blood trail from under a torn crust.  
  
“Had about ten seconds to hide your life’s work,” Steven says hoarsely. “I figured I only knew one man crazy enough to voluntarily stick his finger in a bullet wound…”  
  
Xabi’s eyebrows shoot up.   
  
“Oh, so you shove a data card in your bullet wound, but _I_ ’m the nutter here?!?”  
  
His hands do not waver nearly as much as his voice. Xabi pulls out a flat, weightless hexagonal chip the size of a thumbnail from under Steven’s inflamed skin, staring at it with equal parts of fascination and disgust.   
  
“After things calm down a bit,” Steven rolls painfully on his back again, deflated as if he’d spent the last ounce of energy. “You can start again… if anyone can ever make it work... it should be…”  
  
His eyelids flutter over cloudy eyes a few times as Xabi puts the oxygen mask back on his face. He leans his forehead against Steven’s clammy skin and whispers something above his blood-soaked hair as the medic storms back into the room.


	10. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'll lay my weapon down won't fight no more  
> Trying to get you by my side

Eight weeks later

London, England

The silvery digits are staring back at him defiantly from the center of the door. Never in the history of… anything has the number 22 looked so scornful. He rings the bell after a ridiculous amount of minutes wasted on standing in silence in front of a penthouse flat door.

It instantly seems like a shite decision.

“Hello… Is... uh…”

“Yes, he’s making dinner. Would you like to…”

“I can wait here, thanks. I’m…”

“I know.”

The man actually has the gall to offer Steven a kind smile before he calls out for Xabi.

These are the longest six and a half seconds of Steven’s life. He’s contemplating ripping off the light cast on his arm and beating himself senseless with it, an act of pythonesque penitence worthy of how utterly stupid he feels. Then Xabi shows up, all slacked and sweatered and bearded and beautiful. Not to mention dumfounded.

“Steven…” At first, Xabi doesn’t know what to do with his hands. He seems just as unsure about what to do with the two men standing on each side of him, so he twists the checkered kitchen towel around his fingers until his voice comes back from Awkwardland.

“Hi. Um. Come in… please.”

“Hey. I… can’t, I’m actually on my way to catch a flight,” Steven says and the lie is not just brazen but also ludicrous. The only place he’s going to is an empty apartment with mustard and beer in the fridge and a laptop with a work in progress resignation letter that’s been half-typed up for eleven days now. That’s every single day Steven has been out of the hospital and/or the rehabilitation center. “I just wanted… I came to say goodbye,” he adds, this time truthfully, because in the last half a minute of his life this has become his truth.

Xabi has not had as much practice with bullshitting for a living though so it takes him a bit longer to stop rambling.

“Oh. Well… I’m… This is… um. This is Agent Steven Gerrard. Steven, this is… Quique.”

“Nice to meet you, Enrique,” Steven grins and then looks at Xabi and Xabi looks at him and instantly knows he shouldn’t have.

It’s not that Quique says or does anything out of the ordinary when he catches The Look that passes him by like a bird in full flight. It’s just the way in which he says the right thing…

“I’ll be inside… Nice to meet you, Agent Gerrard.”

Steven nods dumbly and stares for a bit at his flannel-tinted departure.

“Are you sure you don’t want to come in at least for a coffee,” Xabi asks, breaking the spell.

“I can’t, as I was saying…”

“Right… Off on another boring, not at all exciting mission,” Xabi smiles halfheartedly. “I’d ask if you’re going somewhere far or… if you’re coming back soon, but you probably wouldn’t tell me anyway. I had to track down your Danish friend in a pub to find out you were still alive…” he swallows air, trying hard to keep the real words he wants to scream out trapped inside.

“If you can call a dungeon full of tattooed metalheads a pub…”

It’s weak, bordering on lame, and they both know it.

“I tried everything I could think of to find you, to… speak to you,” Xabi gestures with his free hand, “Not that I blame him…considering… but Commander Lampard was not very forthcoming with information. All he could give me was advice to stay out of his way until the operation was finished. I suppose I should be grateful he decided to not have me prosecuted for hijacking his helicopter.”

“Well, Fat Frank does like doing things by the book...” 

“Maybe if you’d bullied him less at the Academy, he’d have nicer things to say about you. But at least Agger told me you were still alive, for the first couple of weeks I didn’t know…” Xabi’s voice trails off a bit and when he picks up, he sounds almost frustrated with himself. “I thought... I guess I was wrong.”

Steven looks down at his cast.

“I didn’t think you’d…” He gets stuck there, the knot in his throat a timely warning sign that’s not very helpful but at least saves him from further embarrassment. “Got your envelope,” he says instead and Xabi’s brow loosens involuntarily. “You’re lucky Powell didn’t arrest you on the spot for attempted bribery of an agent.”

“I explained to your M that it was an old debt. There’s not going to be a Nobel Prize check, it’s only fair. Nobody should have to pay that much for a cup of tea.”

The eight pounds hidden in the envelope that’s burning a hole in the inside pocket of Steven’s leather jacket feel heavy and cumbersome. Steven feels disembodied, like he’s watching a script that should have unfolded just. like. this… this is the part where he would have said A decent price for a couple of pints tho. You got a nice place round the corner, saw you there not really paying attention to the North London derby last fall. There’s hope for you yet… and then he’d do his Merseyside cult initiation bit on the way to the pub. That was Plan A. He hadn’t thought it through very thoroughly past this stage though and his improvised Plan B sucks. 

“Does it still hurt?” Xabi wants to reach out and touch Steven’s elbow, but thinks better of it.

“Nah, just have to wait a few more days for the titanium screws to settle, I’ll be free soon.”

Fuck’s sakes, Gerrard…

For no particular reason, Xabi decides this is the perfect opportunity to stop avoiding eye contact and says point-blank:

“He doesn’t live here anymore, we’re just… we recently decided to try to make it work this time.”

“Good luck,” Steven gives him a thin-lipped smile and nods to add a drop of conviction to it. “I really should get going.”

Er… good to see you? Take care… mate? So fucking daft, the whole thing… He figures it doesn’t really matter if he’s any good at goodbyes or not (he really isn’t), this is the perfect time to just turn on his heels and go rubbish a letter.

He’s only five steps gone when Xabi’s voice rings in the hallway, clear like an epiphany.

“Steven, I… I don’t love him.”

“That’s too bad for him,” Steven sounds surprisingly honest, especially to himself.

“I’ll mail you some guaro,” he says, the corner of his mouth curling over the word the way his tongue can’t before he steps into the elevator.

 

Four months later

Cartagena, Colombia

Friday mornings are generally not Xabi’s favorite time to wake up at 7 am. In fact, he’d been quite stoic to resist the temptation of throwing his phone out the window and shoving his head back under the pillow. Going back to sleep is not that challenging when you live in a bungalow by the beach. He’s wide (if a little irritatingly) awake now as he steps through the debris covering every single inch of what could charitably be called his office. He pushes an impassive brick with the tip of his loafer and looks up at the shattered window, only half listening to the familiar violin-sharp voice echoing from the office next door.

“Oh well, we all feel much safer knowing the Foreign Office is here to write a report. I’m not sure why you need me to tell you that we do have enemies when it’s quite obvious that someone wants us out of their way. There’s at least five of the major oil investors we’ve made quite unhappy last week alone, do they not require you research your assignments?”

The woman walks out into Xabi’s office with a look of disdain thrown over her shoulder and he suddenly stands there, eyes wide, arms hanging limply by his body, not giving a damn about the devastation surrounding them.

“Xabs, good to see you’re in one piece at least,” her Scottish burr comes through stronger when she’s tired or furious, both of which Xabi’d witnessed rarely in their months of working together. “The UK embassy apparently thinks a bureaucratic shoulder to cry on all the way from Bogota is what we need at the moment…”

She stops to look behind her and back at Xabi and the coin clinks when it drops.

“Are you going to introduce me to Double Oh Sexy or what?”

He does, although Xabi’s not sure who this version of Steven in a suit is. Not that he’s complaining or anything. It’s a very nice suit, goes incredibly well with his eyes.

“So you’re a protector of London-based NGOs now?” Xabi asks once they’re left alone under some pretext or other.

They walk idly among morning rush office workers zipping along Cartagena’s business district boulevard. They make small talk about Xabi’s new life in Colombia as the resident expert of oil watchdogs who’d just been bitten hard this morning following the publication of their latest report about environmental fuckups off the coast. They both pretend that Steven doesn’t know his every move for the past four months in great detail already.

“I prefer to think of myself as a… cultural envoy of my nation,” Steven says wryly.

“So… of all the little countries in the world cursed with oil reserves and a weak institutional framework, Her Majesty sent you to mine?”

“She works in mysterious ways.”

Xabi chuckles deep in his throat, making absolutely no effort to look away from how tan and rested and… good Steven looks.

“None of this makes any sense, does it? I’d really like someone to explain to me how it’s possible to spend a week with a man who shot me, kidnapped me…” Steven braces himself with a ready line about the waterfall, but Xabi has no intention of ever complaining about that part again. “…more than half a year ago and not be able to stop thinking about him every single day?”

They stop in front of a café, the smells of fresh brews and sticky pastry drifting out onto the sidewalk.

“You’re probably still thinking with your dick.”

Judging by Xabi’s smile, the theory has merit.

“Well… are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Still trying to get into my pants?”

“Still playing hard to get?”

“Don’t know if I can afford it anymore with a lousy embassy job. The downgraded security clearance isn’t terribly sexy.”

“Do you come home safe every night?”

“Relatively safe. Most nights.”

“Do you sleep with your SIG under the pillow?”

“On the nightstand.”

Of course, Xabi thinks. All business, forget the Hollywood stuff.

“I can work with that. Plus, you’re still a Royal Marine, right? You probably got to keep the dress uniform when you retired.”

“Yep…” Steven nods, unable to play innocent about where this is going. Unwilling, if he’s perfectly honest.

“I can definitely work with that.” This was the part that used to confuse the hell out of Xabi in his bad hair university years, but that’s long past him now. “Would you like to have a drink with me?”

Steven wishes he could stop grinning, he really does. It’s just not that easy.

“Sure… I’ll have a drink with you. I could do with something to eat too, actually.”

Xabi frowns.

“Can we fuck first? I promise I’ll buy you lunch later,” he says in an appeasing tone, oblivious to the looks they’re getting from the ladies in suits walking past them and out of the café.

“Back off, ladies,” Steven warns sternly, “I saw him first.”

He’s practically shoved into the nearest taxi.

 

The End

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Soundtrack courtesy of Noel Gallagher:
> 
> http://wrotefootballficiregretnothing.tumblr.com/post/48213461449


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